8vo. 209pp, [1]. With an engraved portrait frontispiece. Printed in Didot type. Contemporary gilt-ruled half-calf, marbled boards, black morocco lettering-piece. Heavily rubbed, loss to lettering-piece. Inked ownership inscription to FEP: 'John Fowles / 1963'.

The first edition of, sometime Russian ambassador to Naples, Fedor Golovkine's (1766-1823) epistolary novel inspired by Austrian composer Joseph Weigl's (1766- 1846) comic opera La principessa d’Amalfi (1794). A damning pencilled annotation in the present copy, in the hand of the previous owner, English novelist John Fowles (1926- 2005), dismisses the work as 'an insipid bit of Scottery'. The 1829 second edition was appended by Édouard Gauttier d'Arc's (1799-1843) travelogue Voyage de Naples à Amalfi.