The family that would later be called the Soncinos fled Speyer (a town in the Rhineland) in the wake of a general edict of 1435 expelling that town's Jews. Assisted by Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, they eventually settled in Soncino, the town in northern Italy from which they took the name by which they are now known. There, after a stint as bankers, the family turned in the early 1480s to printing. Joshua Solomon Soncino's nephews, Moses and Gershom, assisted him in this business. The peripatetic Gershom eventually worked not only in Soncino but also in Brescia, Barco, Pesaro, Ortona, Rimini, Cesena, Salonica, and Constantinople, as well as Fano, a town in the central Italian Marches where his Petrarch appeared. Gershom published books in Hebrew but his publications also included works of Humanism, Italian literature, Christian theology, Pope Pius II's "Hymn to the Virgin," and state documents. His handsomely printed edition of the Rime—in a veritable coup against Aldus, Soncino had a new and magnificent humanist cursive typeface designed by Francesco Griffo of Bologna; the edition itself was dedicated to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli's model of the new "prince"—was intended to stand comparison—and thus to compete with—the Aldine Rime printed in Venice in 1501.
