Pietro Della Valle

[1] When Pietro was disappointed in love and began to consider suicide, Mario Schipano, a professor of medicine in Naples, suggested the idea of travelling in the East.

So, at age 28, he left Venice by boat on 8 June 1614 and reached Constantinople; he remained there for more than a year and acquired a good knowledge of Turkish and a little Arabic.

After seeing a portrait of the beautiful Assyrian Christian Sitti Maani Gioerida, daughter of a Nestorian Catholic father and an Armenian mother,[3] he went to Baghdad and married her a month later.

While in the Middle East, he made one of the first modern records of the location of ancient Babylon and provided "remarkable descriptions" of the site.

[2] When Shah ʿAbbās returned to winter quarters at Faraḥābād, Della Valle, who was unwell, went to Isfahan, where he hoped the Augustinians and Carmelites would restore him to health.

The rest of his life was uneventful; he married his second wife, Mariuccia (Tinatin de Ziba), a Georgian orphan of a noble family.

He died in Rome on 21 April 1652,[2] and is buried at his family's burial vault at Santa Maria in Ara Coeli.

They contain accounts of his discussions with "Hindoo" Brahmans about whether the Egyptians or Indians first came up with the concept of reincarnation, a dialogue with a woman who invited him to her upcoming sati, a description of the barefoot 'Queen of Olaza', who was out on the embankments giving directions to her engineers—and many other bits of first-rate ethnography.

Pietro Della Valle also wrote texts and librettos for several musical spectacles, such as "Il carro di fedeltà d'Amore", (music by his teacher of harpsichord Paolo Quagliati, performed in Rome in 1606 and printed in 1611), and "La valle rinverdita" (written in celebration of the birth of his first child in 1629, now lost).

"In a letter written in Damascus and Aleppo, dated June 15, 1616, Della Valle described his delight at finding some rare Samaritan manuscripts, some of them with glosses in Arabic, for sale.