Biography
Pietro Della Valle was born in Rome in April 1586 (on the 11th according to Treccani's Dizionario biografico degli italiani, on the 2nd according to English Wikipedia), to Pompeo Della Valle and Giovanna Alberini, in a noble family that claimed medieval ancestors. He received a humanist education, including Latin and Greek, and studied music with several Roman masters, among them Paolo Quagliati. Around the age of twenty, he had Il carro di Fedeltà d'Amore (1606) staged in Rome, with music by Quagliati. He lived in Naples from 1609 to 1614, where he frequented the physician and man of letters Mario Schipano, who would become the recipient of his letters.
A gentleman with no lasting office, he first made a name as a poet, musician and scholar, and took part in expeditions against corsairs. Later, back in Rome, he received from Pope Urban VIII the title of cameriere d'onore, according to Wikipedia. There he resumed his study of Oriental languages, built musical instruments and wrote on ancient and modern music, notably a Discorso sulla musica dell'età nostra (1640).
He left Venice on 8 June 1614, in pilgrim's dress, hence his nickname "Pellegrino." He passed through Constantinople, Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria, then reached Baghdad, where he married Sitti Maani Gioerida, a Christian from the region. He arrived in Isfahan in 1617 and met Shah Abbas. His wife died around 1621, near the Persian Gulf, and he carried her embalmed body with him. In January 1623, he embarked for Surat aboard an English ship, the Whale, and stayed in India until November 1624. He returned by way of Muscat, Basra and Aleppo, reached Naples on 6 February 1626, then Rome on 28 March 1626. His letters appeared under the title Viaggi di Pietro della Valle il pellegrino, descritti da lui medesimo in lettere familiari: Turkey at Rome in 1650, Persia in 1658, India and the return in 1663, these last two volumes after his death, through the care of his widow and sons. A reprint appeared in Turin in 1843, with the false imprint of Brighton.
His second wife, Mariam Tinatin di Ziba, a Georgian orphan adopted by Maani, bore him, according to Wikipedia, fourteen children. He belonged to the Accademia degli Umoristi and, according to Treccani, to that of the Lincei in 1629. After a quarrel in which a servant of the Barberini was killed, he was sentenced in absentia in 1636, went into exile near Rome and then between Naples and Gaeta, and returned to Rome in March 1638.
He died in Rome on 21 April 1652 and rests in the family chapel of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where Maani was buried in 1627. His papers are scattered: the Della Valle-Del Bufalo collection in the Vatican Apostolic Archives, his journals in the Ottoboniani manuscripts of the Vatican Library, manuscript volumes of the Viaggi at the Italian Geographical Society and at Modena. Among the modern editions, Luigi Bianconi published the Viaggio in Levante (Florence, 1942), Francesco Gaeta and Lockhart the Lettere dalla Persia (Rome, 1972), and Mario Vitalone the Diario di viaggio in Persia (2023).
