Alessandro de Bianchi: Viaggi in Armenia,Kurdistan e Lazistan.Milano 1865 First edition,tall Quarto,publishers paper covers slightly dusty and soiled,spine renew,complete 325p.,one folded map,water stain in the upper part of the last twenty pages,overall in almost very good condition The Italian traveler and scholar Alessandro de Bianchi travelled in the remote areas of Pontos and eastern Anatolia at a very early date for those remote places.Specially Lazistan,the land of the Laz people, a Caucasian ethnic group related with Pontic Greeks, was a rugged, semi-autonomous coastal region on the southeastern Black Sea. Bianchi documents the power of the Derebeys, the valley lords. These local hereditary rulers held immense power, often defying the central Ottoman government in Constantinople. Bianchi was fascinated by the marginal groups of the Empire. He provides ethnographic notes on the Laz and Pontic Greeks, who were known as fierce sailors and warriors.His travels through the Pontic Mountains and the basins of Lake Van and the Upper Euphrates provided one of the few contemporary Italian accounts of these strategic borderlands The book contain a very early and accurate map of those areas. Bianchi’s route through the Lazistan highlands was much less traveled that time and therefore provides unique data on the local economy and social structures.He was among the very first who report the fine Byzantines Churches of the area,still largely intact