The Antique Collection is dedicated to rare and highly valuable volumes spanning the course of three centuries, from 1545 to 1898. It includes works on law, insurance and actuarial science and includes several prized 16th century manuscripts.
One of these stands out: Tractatus De mercatura, seu mercatore, by Benvenuto Stracca, published in Venice in 1553, represents the first document dedicated to legal matters surrounding maritime insurance.
Benvenuto was born in Ancona in 1509 and rose to become a renowned jurist in his city of birth, where he held high-ranking positions. A Renaissance man, he was the first to examine commercial law as an independent aggregation of regulations, distinct from those guiding civil law. He offered a systematic interpretation that took into account the applications of law and the local institutions developed in response to the boom in maritime commerce taking place at the time.
He completed his interpretation of mercantile affairs – which began with De mercatura – in 1569 with the combined publication of De assicurationibus, dedicated to Ugo Boncompagni, his law professor at Bologna and future Pope Gregory XIII, and De adiecto, dedicated to the future Pope Innocent IX. De assicurationibus is an original work, a glossary of the individual components of the Anconetani insurance policy, with Stracca going through the policy line-by-line and offering interpretations of such questions as may arise.
De proxenetis, et proxeneticis, published in Venice in 1558, was another significant success story in the landscape of 16th century treatises. In this text, Stracca begins by taking the historical figure of the mediator and offers a holistic framework of the primary issues surrounding the matchmaker and matchmaking at the dawn of the early modern period.