Romanzetto storico contemporaneo intitolato Amor focoso, ossia avventure di un ex-brigante calabrese in America [Contemporary Historical Romance entitled Firey Love, or Adventures of an Ex-Bandit Calabrese in America][Facsimile]. New York: [Copyright 1886, by August Bassetti; Right of translation reserved], 1887.

Romanzetto storico contemporaneo intitolato Amor focoso, ossia avventure di un ex-brigante calabrese in America [Contemporary Historical Romance entitled Firey Love, or Adventures of an Ex-Bandit Calabrese in America][Facsimile]. New York: [Copyright 1886, by August Bassetti; Right of translation reserved], 1887.

In this novel, the author appears as a character who like the novel itself unabashedly promotes his two grammars (like this copy, a facsimile copy of one of which is in the collection) as designed to help the working class, untutored Italian immigrant learn English easily. Bassetti also published a dictionary and a second novel, a facsimile copy of which is also in the collection, all five of which works were published between 1885 and 1889. His was the first English grammar pointedly designed to be useful for the Italian immigrant with little formal schooling in Italian.

Of Augusto Bassetti we know little; but from the record, we believe that he was not an immigrant but  born in the U.S. of Italian parents. He taught Italian and music, lecturing in New York's Irving Hall in 1867, as reported in New York English language newspapers; earlier, in 1859, he carried on an epistolary romance backstage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with Marietta Piccolomini, a Sienese soprano singing on an American tour in New York and Boston that year. The letters are preserved at the Archivio di Stato of Siena.

See further discussion of Bassetti in my writeup of his grammar.

Augusto Bassetti

[Copyright 1886, by August Bassetti; Right of translation reserved]

1887

22 x 15cm; 48 p.

Italian