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17996043Napoli 1799. No earlier editions known. Very Good/Popular ballad in Italian verse in which Mary Joseph and the baby Jesus encounter a poor fortune-teller who in spite of her poverty hosts the family and tends to its needs during the flight into Egypt. The fortune-teller recognizes the baby as divine and after praising him and his parents and in exchange for salvation she foretells the Passion. The Italian text is a contemporary translation of a chapbook with no date in Sicilian dialect "Zingaredda Induvina" attributed to one Fra Pietro da Palermo. Surviving copies of any edition are extremely unusual. A few 19th-century copies are extant an 1880 printing is even scanned online. As far as we know this is earliest dated copy and the exemplar for all later printings. The figure of the "Gypsy" Rom fortune teller who succors the family during the flight into Egypt is a local Neapolitan addition to the events accounted in the Gospels. Even today the figure of the fortune-teller appears in Neapolitan and Southern Italian creches "presepe" and Christmas plays where she is represented as holding a nail or sometimes a basket of nails because she foretells the Passion in the canzonetta offered here. 15 cm; 8 pages. Woodcut illustration on title page. Title within decorated border. Untrimmed. Unbound. Preserved in custom portfolio with cutout to display title page. Red ribbon tie. Owner's inscription in margin of title page possibly that of Michele Tafuri Neapolitan literary scholar and collector of manuscripts who flourished in the first half of the 19th century. Reference: S. Salmone-Marino "Le storie popolari in poesia siciliana messe a stampa." in Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari 1897 p 112 f.; "La Fuga in Egitto: variazioni sul tema e divinazione" on the Gypsypedia web site; Domenica Borriello "Stampatori del sacro a Napoli tra Ottocento e Novecento" Etnoantropologia V:2 2017. unknown books