CASTALDI, PAMFILO. — Italian physician and printer, born in Feltre around 1398 (22 September?), died perhaps in Venice after 1479. The scant information available about him permits the establishment of only a few certain dates: in 1461, and certainly until 1464, he was in Capodistria, where he practised his profession as a physician; in 1469 he was in Venice, and in 1471 in Milan, a printer “cum privilegio” of Galeazzo Maria Sforza; in 1472 he renounced the privilege; in 1474 he was once again in Venice.
A legend, based on a late chronicle by Fr. A. Cambruzzi (Storia di Feltre, Feltre 1674) and on the erroneous interpretation of several archival documents, regards C. as the inventor of printing; but this tradition, which took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century, has been shown by critical examination to be without foundation and is now completely abandoned. What is still considered possible (if the report of two sheets that our subject allegedly printed in Capodistria around 1461 is true) is that C. was the first Italian printer; nor can it be excluded that, in a certain sense, he “reinvented” printing, drawing on information from Mainz without having direct knowledge of Gutenberg’s experiments and method.
It seems accepted that the following works came from his presses, with the collaboration of A. Zarotto: the De verborum significatu of Festus, the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela, and the work of L. B. Alberti, which appeared anonymously in Milan in 1471. The edition of Cicero’s Epistolae, which appeared in Milan in March 1472 under the name of Filippo di Lavagna, who had entered into partnership with C. during that period, was probably also the result of his work.