Adriano Politi is best known today for his Italian translation of
Tacitus (
Opere di C. Tacito, Rome, 1604 and 1611; a revised and improved edition of Politi's translation was published in Venice in 1644). Politi's translation was reissued in the luxurious edition of Tacitus's complete works, edited by Girolamo Canini d'Anghiari. Published in 1618 by
Giunti and
Ciotti, this new edition of Politi's translation was hugely successful despite being a complex and expensive work. When he reprinted it just two years later the printer Giunti noted that in only a few months it had sold 1,200 copies but demand outstripped the supply. The edition was reissued three times during the first half of the century (1620, 1628, and 1641). Politi is also known for his
Dittionario toscano, published in 1613–14, and for his place in the
Questione della lingua. A defender of the Sienese dialect, he followed
Claudio Tolomei's lead in rejecting
Florentine exclusivity and, in opposition to the thesis of
Pietro Bembo and
Lionardo Salviati, he gave preference to the
spoken language over the
literary one. His
Dittionario, an abridgment of the
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, added Sienese equivalents to some of the
Vocabolario distinctively
Florentine lexical items. Among his other notable works is the
Ordo Romanæ historiæ legendæ (Venice, 1627, and in vol. 3 of Gaudenzio Roberti's
Miscellanea Italica erudita). == Notes ==