Italian Language & Literature: 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