The Bibliophilic Networks of Umberto Saba and the Serlupi Crescenzi Collection:
Provenance, Collecting Practices, and the Circulation of Books between Trieste and Florence (1920–1950)

This project investigates the bibliophilic and commercial connections between the poet-bookseller Umberto Saba (1883–1957), the Florentine antiquarian Tammaro De Marinis (1878–1969), and Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi and Gilberta von Ritter de Zahony, founders of the Biblioteca Serlupiana. It focuses on a recently identified group of 364 volumes from Saba’s Libreria Antiquaria di Trieste, now preserved in the Biblioteca Serlupiana at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

The presence of the 364 volumes from Saba’s collection illuminates the complex web of relationships between the trade of rare books, the aristocratic culture of collecting, and the intellectual world of Italian modernism. Through a combination of archival research, provenance analysis, and material bibliography, the project reconstructs the circulation of books, exchange of knowledge, and shared material culture linking Trieste and Florence between the 1920s and 1950s.

While Saba’s methods of cataloguing, maintaining correspondence with clients, and marking books with alphanumeric codes linking them to sales catalogues anticipated practices of modern provenance documentation, his poetic and commercial sensibility intersected with the Serlupi Crescenzi’s systematic and aristocratic collecting ethos, grounded in a profound respect for the book object as a work of art. This interaction reveals a dual model of bibliophilia: one rooted in commercial circulation and poetic sensibility (Saba), the other in systematic acquisition and aesthetic conservation (the Serlupi).

Starting from the interaction among Saba, De Marinis and Serlupi, the project broadens its scope to encompass the wider Florentine milieu of poets, critics, publishers, and collectors—such as D’Annunzio, Montale, Ojetti, and Olschki—whose collaborations brought literature and politics into touch with the rare-book market. By tracing the provenance and annotations of the Saba–Serlupi corpus, this research illuminates a pivotal moment in twentieth-century Italian book history, when literature, commerce, and collecting converged—contributing to broader debates on bibliophilia, cultural mediation, and the preservation of material heritage.