Un principe nel deserto: Leone Caetani nel Sinai e nel Sahara. I diari, le letters, le fotografie (1888-1890).

• Author: Hamilton, Alastair

Un principe nel deserto: Leone Caetani nel Sinai e nel Sahara. I diari, le letters, le fotografie (1888-1890). By VALENTINA SAGARJA ROSSI. Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Fondazione Leone Caetani. vol. 28. Rome: BARDI EDIZIONI. 2018. Pp. 561, illus. [euro]68.

Leone Caetani is now generally acknowledged to have been one of the foremost Italian orientalists of his day. Recognition, however, came late. For many years Caetani, from an old and distinguished family, was regarded as something of a lightweight, hard working and productive indeed, but a gifted amateur, a gentleman scholar with few academic qualifications, who could hardly compete with the industrious Semiticists teaching at the Italian universities.

The eldest son of Onorato Caetani, fourteenth duke of Sermoneta and fourth prince of Teano, who was appointed Italian minister of foreign affairs in 1896, Leone Caetani was born in 1869. His mother, Ada Bootle-Wilbraham, the daughter of Lord Skelmersdale, was English. He studied, with no great distinction, at the Universita della Sapienza in Rome and. in 1891. obtained a degree in history. At university he had started to learn eastern languages, particularly Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, under Ignazio Guidi. but although he gradually acquired some knowledge of a great many other oriental languages and managed to impress his less learned contemporaries--the librarian of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana assembled by his uncle James Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, described him as "a wonderful linguist" who "can understand about 30 languages and dialects"--the more professional orientalists, such as Guidi's son Michelangelo, had grave doubts about how well he knew them.

In her extensive introduction to the texts and letters by Caetani contained in Un principe nel deserto, Valentina Sagaria Rossi, the curator of the oriental material at the Fondazione Leone Caetani at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, reconstructs Caetani's study of Arabic. His first teacher was indeed Ignazio Guidi, possibly the finest Italian Semiticist of his generation and the teacher not only of Caetani and of his own son Michelangelo, but also of Giorgio Levi Della Vida and others. Guidi remained Caetani's friend and guide for many years. But Caetani also took private lessons from Arabicspeaking Christians in Rome--one was a painter apparently from Beirut, Filippo Murani, and the other a Maronite from Damascus. Nevertheless, when he arrived in Egypt in 1888 and when he...