“Galanterie di cose rare…”: Filippo Sassetti's Indian Shopping List for the Medici Grand Duke Francesco and His Brother Cardinal Ferdinando

Abstract

Between 1584 and 1588, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti sent a whole sequence of letters from India to his friends and the grand ducal court in Florence. He informed his correspondents about local Indian plants, animals, the mechanisms of commercial exchange and Indian social structures and politics. Apart from publishing and editing letters, the scholarship so far has focused on linguistic, geographic, medical and ethnographical issues related to his letters. This article focuses on a set of rarely explored resources: the valuable objects sent with Sassetti's letters to the grand duke Francesco de Medici (1541–87) and his brother cardinal Ferdinando (1549–1609). The letters are exceptional, since they allow one to reconstruct the origins and itineraries of the items that Sassetti describes in detail. None of the objects survived in Florence but some of them are traceable to the Medici inventories of the sixteenth century.