Travels of Pietro Della Valle the Pilgrim

Pietro Della Valle's Viaggi, letters addressed to his friend Mario Schipano, appeared in Rome in three parts: Turkey in 1650, Persia in 1658, India in 1663. Five witnesses were compared. Two reproductions of the Roman edition of 1650, on Internet Archive and on Gallica, contain only Turkey; no digitization of the 1663 part has been found. The Brighton reprint (G. Gancia, 1843) brings the three parts together in two volumes, the first of which stops before India. The English translation of 1664, reissued by the Hakluyt Society in 1892, departs from the author's Italian. The text we selected for our work is therefore the 1843 reprint, in the second volume of the New York Public Library copy.

The scan was converted to text, then proofread and cleaned. Only the first three letters from India were extracted. The section numbers placed at the head of paragraphs were set aside, as were the reference marks for the notes of the 1843 editor, notes that are absent from this passage; the place and date lines that open each letter were kept. The narrative consists of three letters dated 1623, written from Surat and then from Goa, divided into numbered sections. The text thus established runs to about 51,000 words.

How we transform the text. This book is neither a literal translation nor a facsimile: it is a rewriting in today's language, carried out in three stages. Modernisation renders the text in contemporary English; each place and person receives a single modern form, and period terms (currencies, measures, titles) are kept, with a light gloss where needed. Clarification untangles the long sentences of the period, one idea per sentence, adding nothing and removing nothing. Shaping the narrative divides the text into titled chapters and restores its flow; repetitive passages are condensed, but no dated, numbered or named fact is removed. Each stage is followed by a review of fidelity to the original text.