At first, I simply searched the name of the book, “Newes Itinerarium Italiae”. The books that came up had only limited connections or similarities to my book. Therefore, I proceeded to search the contents of the book, to check if they mentioned my book. I did this by searching variations of the title in the pdf file of the book with the command ctrl+f. I did not find any mentioning of my book.
Then I proceeded to look up terms that fit the content of my book. For example, the topics of Italy, architecture, travel guide and 17th century. The books that came up had again only limited connections or similarities to my book.
Looking up the author, Joseph Furrtenbach did not get me any satisfying results.
Surprisingly, the best matches were the books that came up when searching the title, even though it was not mentioned in the books that came up.
The first book I picked is called “The Boundless Sea” by David Abulafia (2020). Abulafia is a British historian with a special interest in Italy, Spain, and the rest of the Mediterranean. The Boundless Sea fittingly contains the history of the Mediterranean. Even though it is not a travel guide, it is to maritime history of the Mediterranean, what Newes Itinerarium italiae is to Italian architecture in the 17th century.
The second book I picked is a better fit to my book. It is called “Letters of an Architect from France, Italy and Greece” by Joseph Woods (1828/2014). It is a collection of Letters from the architect Joseph Woods, who in 1816 embarked on a two-year journey through France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece, documenting interesting flora as well as buildings of note. It is not a guide or encyclopaedia of the architecture of said places. It is a collection of impressions of the journey. Though the similarities to my book are still there. An architect travelling through Europe (and Italy), writing about its architecture.