Note 421 — PRIMO VIAGGIO INTORNO AL MONDO (continued 3)

MS. 5,650 reads: “If venom or poison be put in a vase of fine porcelain, it breaks immediately.” In accordance with this reading we have added in brackets in the Italian the word veleno, i.e., “poison,” which seems to have been omitted by the amanuensis. Mosto (p. 88, note 3) quotes the following from Marcantonio Pigafetta’s Itinerario da Vienna a Constantinopoli (p. 208), when speaking of the present brought to Sultan Selim II by the Persian ambassador which consisted of “eight dishes [piati firuarii] which break if any one puts poison in them. Those piati firuarii are made of the substance which we call porcelain, and are made in China, the province situated in the extreme outskirts of the Orient. They are made of earth, which is kept for more than fifty years buried in the earth, in order to refine it, and which is buried by the father for his son. Thus it passes from hand to hand.” See also Yule’s Cathay, ii, p. 478; and Burnell and Tiele’s Linschoten (Hakluyt Society publications), i, pp. 129, 130.