I manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze

The article provides an account of the provenance of the small but prestigious group of Oriental manuscripts (Arabic, Persian and Turkish) which forms part of the manuscript collections in the Biblioteca Riccardiana. Almost all of them were acquired by Gabriello Riccardi (1705-1798) for his private library, which was later merged into the family collection. The group is formed of 37 Oriental manuscripts which Gabriello had already purchased some time before 1736 from Giovan Battista Doni, to which he added in 1735 three manuscripts from the library of Anton Maria Salvini and five further manuscripts coming from the Strozzi library in 1786. The article also examines the catalogues in the Riccardiana which describe the manuscripts; these were, necessarily, the work of specialists and as such were always quite separate from the catalogues for the rest of the library’s collections.