SIR, I write to point out some factual errors in Philippe Mal­gouyres’s review of my book Bernini in Francia. Paul de Chantelou e il Journal de Voyage du Cavalier Bernini en France in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.778–79.

Of my translation, Malgouyres asserts: ‘This new one is not based on the original manuscripts but on the French edition of the text made by Lalanne in 1885’. However, in my preface I state: ‘For the first time a complete translation of the Journal is published here based on a comparison of the two extant man­uscripts: the MS.2105 of the Library of the Institut de France and that of the Institut Néerlandais of Paris’. This is proved also by thirty citations in my footnotes of the manuscript in the Institut de France and 158 comparative references between that text (of which I was the first person to have made a complete microfilm) and that in the Institut Néerlandais.

In note 4 of his review Malgouyres criticises the modification of the original punctuation to make the text more readable, even though the same is done in Stanic’s French edition of 2001 that Malgouyres cites as being the standard reference.

‘Also regrettable’, the reviewer writes, ‘is the lack of differentiation of the phrases and words written by Chantelou in Italian, thus making it impossible to distinguish the citations, from the rest of the text’. But all Chantelou’s Italian phrases in the Institut de France MS (almost always omitted in the Institut Néerlandais MS) are printed in italics in the Italian translation precisely to distinguish them as Italian phrases in the original French text.