Research Guides: Italian: Primary Sources

Digital Dante at Columbia

The newly revamped and relaunched Digital Dante project is the result of a collaboration between Columbia University's Department of Italian, the Humanities & History division of the Columbia Libraries, and Columbia's Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. The site includes:

Italian text and English translations of the Divine Comedy, complete with original commentary by Professor Teodolinda Barolini;
A library of Dante's other works in their original language and, sometimes, in translation;
An innovative Intertextual Dante platform that enables users to trace intertextuality in Dante and Ovid's works;
Unique illustrations of Dante's work drawn from 15th- and 16th-century editions held in Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library;
Digital projects, including original animations and recordings of sestina readings by Columbia students;
Secondary scholarship on Dante's life and works;

and much more!

Primary Source Databases at Columbia

Art theorists of the Italian Renaissance The database is a collection of treatises on art and architecture from the period 1470 to 1775. It is structured around the two Italian editions of Giogio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Early European books: printed sources to 1700
Diverse array of printed sources from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries held in European libraries. Full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts as well as marginalia and annotations (when extant).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) Provides full-text and full-page-image access to a vast range of English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, and ephemera
Electronic Enlightenment Searchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends.
Mirabile: Archivio digitale della cultura latina medievale Mirabile is an online content aggregator of medieval resources. It contains extensive databases of medieval studies resulting from collaboration between the Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL) and the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini (FEF) and their journals published by SISMEL - Edizioni del Galluzzo.
Opera Del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) via ARTFL
A database containing nearly 2,000 vernacular texts (21.2 million words, 479,000 unique forms), the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. Now available through ARTFL which has a variety of other resources, most relating to the history of the French language.
Witchcraft in Europe and America The majority of texts are in Latin, English and German, although there are also selected items in French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch and Spanish.

Italian Studies Digital Humanities Projects

Dartmouth Dante Project
The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) is a searchable full-text database containing more than seventy commentaries on Dante's Divine Comedy.
Decameron Web @ Brown
This XML electronic edition of Boccaccio's Decameron and other works, and the accompanying hypermedia archive of contextual materials, are conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late medieval life and culture.
Florentine Renaissance Sources
From the Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University. This site gives access to a database (c. 165,000 records) with information about office holders of the Florentine Republic during its 250-year history. An edition of the Tre Maggiori, Guild elections and Birth registrations is now available. The Gazeteer gives access to a database of ca. 750 items that can be located on the Buonsignori map of 1584/94. It also includes the Online Catasto of 1427.
The French of Italy at Fordham
This website, in conjuction with Fordham's French of England and French of Outremer sites, aims to expand awareness of these two kinds of French texts—both those composed and those copied in Italy—and the communities in which they were produced, to encourage new scholarly approaches to the literary and historical evidence. Texts were produced within the context of specific literary communities, each with its own geographic sphere of influence. These include: The Franco-Italian Communities, The Italian Angevins, and The Franco-Fiorentini. Includes maps and glossary.
The Galileo Project at Rice
The Galileo Project is a source of information on the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). The aim is to provide hypertextual information about Galileo and the science of his time to viewers of all ages and levels of expertise.
HyperCities (Rome) at Stanford
Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA and USC and using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive environment. Explore maps and walks of Rome from 211 CE- 1979 CE.
Interactive Nolli Map at U of Oregon
The Nolli Web Site presents the 1748 Nolli map of Rome as a dynamic, interactive, hands-on tool. The public now has access to cataloged information about the map in both written and graphical form.
The Medici Archive Project
Including the new BIA database for accessing the epistolary collections of the Florentine Grand Dukes, the Medici Archive Project is dedicated to fostering scholarship about the Medici. This resource is indispensable to those working on the Medici family and on Renaissance Florence as well as anyone interested in international diplomacy in the early modern world. It contains over three million letters and documents from the Medici Granducal Archive.
Oregon Petrarch Open Book
The OPOB includes Ettore Modigliani’s diplomatic edition of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta; Gianfranco Contini’s edition and Giuseppe Savoca’s critical edition; the commentary by Alessandro Vellutello (1525), the Spanish and French translations by Enrique Garcés and Vasquin Philieul (16th century), an English translation (A. S. Kline), and partial translations in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and German. *You must set up an account.
Princeton Dante Project 2.0
The Princeton Dante Project launched in 1999.The PDP combines a traditional approach to the study of Dante's Comedy with new techniques of compiling and consulting data, images, and sound.
Progetto Pico (Brown University and Università degli Studi di Bologna)
The Brown-University of Bologna Pico Project began as a collaborative online annotated edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on Human Dignity (1486), presented in its first printed edition (Bologna, 1496). It now includes Pico's Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae (1486), or 900 Theses. Using the VHLaboratory platform, scholars and students of Pico can contribute to the translation and annotation of the Theses from anywhere in the world. Additional texts by and on Pico will be added in the near future, including digital versions of the incunabula held at the Brown and Bologna libraries.
Theater That Was Rome Project at Brown
The Theater that was Rome looks at the creation of early modern Rome as a theater populated by a cosmopolitan group of engineers, artists, architects, authors, printers and publishers, gardeners, pilgrims, clerics, aristocrats and intellectual cardinals who contributed to the flood of printed information that proceeded from early modern interest in the physical and mythological city.
Visualizing Venice
Visualizing Venice is a series of inquiries into how social and economic change shaped the city of Venice over time. Using documents/archival sources, collaborative groups of students map and model the process of change in the city.
The World of Dante at UVa
The World of Dante is a multimedia research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings. These include an encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations.