Pasta for Nightingales: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore
by Giovanni Pietro Olina & Cassiano dal Pozzo

The first-ever English translation of a seventeenth-century ornithology text, complete with historic watercolor illustrations.

This beautifully illustrated book brings together the newly commissioned, first-ever English translation of one of the earliest studies in ornithology with the original watercolors, now part of the British Royal Collection, that provided the inspiration for its engraved illustrations. The watercolors, created for the “Paper Museum” of the seventeenth-century scholar and art collector Cassiano dal Pozzo, are here combined with the translated text of amateur naturalist Pietro Olina’s original Uccelliera of 1622 to create a new work that provides a fascinating glimpse of ornithology’s earliest days—a period when folklore informed natural history studies as much as science did.