Time in Italy
Chladni spent time in Italy from 1810 to 1811, staying in varuous places such as Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Venice. He spent from October 1810 to April 1811 in Turin and during this time, he was at the home of Count Nuvolone Pergamo, the deputy president of the Royal Agrarian Society of Turin.
This letter was written to an unknown professor in Padua after Chladni's six-month residence with Count Nuvolone Pergamo in Turin. It enclosed some seeds for the professor from the Count, which Chladni is mailing to him since he will probably not be visiting Padua this year (though he seems after all to have done so). The watermark of this 1811 letter (a cherub displaying a banner with the Latin motto TO PARADISE) is identical, apart from the motto, with watermarks in paper used by Thomas Jefferson between 1802 and 1811. The countermark in one of the Jefferson sheets (GM, with a fleur-de-lis) makes it almost certain that the papermaker was Giorgio Magnani of Cartiera Magnani in Brescia, a firm founded in 1414 and still an important mill. Jefferson may have purchased his stock during his stay in Paris; Chladni could have found Magnani paper in Italy, Paris, or almost anywhere in Europe.