Dante 2025, the first digital database dedicated to ancient commentaries on the Divine Comedy is born

Dante Alighieri ’s Divine Comedy is the only major work of Italian literature that, since its earliest circulation, has always been accompanied by commentaries. Dante’s long exegetical tradition testifies not only to the poem’s extraordinary vitality, but also represents a fundamental piece in Italian cultural and linguistic history.

On the occasion of Dantedì 2025 - the national day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, celebrated every year on March 25 - the first digital database dedicated to ancient commentaries on the Comedy will be launched. This is the Corpus CoDA (Corpus of Ancient Dante Commentaries), which currently collects 67 texts with a total of 4,975,798 occurrences, freely accessible for free. Each text is accompanied by a concise explanatory card, which has been merged into the first digital bibliography of Dantean commentaries, the BCD - Bibliography of Dantean Commentaries.

The Corpus CoDA and the BCD are only the first tools developed as part of a larger project dedicated to ancient Dante exegesis. The initiative stems from a collaboration between the University of Naples “Federico II,” the CNR Institute - Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (Ovi) and Sapienza University of Rome, and is currently being carried out thanks to the PRIN 2022 project.

These tools are designed to improve the possibilities of research on Dante and, more generally, on ancient Italian texts, with potential applications also in the educational field. Cnr-Ovi, which already provides fundamental resources such as the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) and the Vocabolario Dantesco (VD) in collaboration with the Accademia della Crusca, now integrates the CoDA Corpus within the Naples Dante Project (NDP), the largest online aggregator dedicated to Dante’s textual and iconographic tradition, promoted by the University of Naples “Federico II.”

Research Group

University of Naples “Federico II”: Vittorio Celotto (PI), Giulia Lucci, Valentina Sferragatta

CNR-Ovi: Zeno Verlato (responsible), Salvatore Arcidiacono, Andrea Boccellari, Roberta Di Giorgi, Diego Dotto, Cristiano Lorenzi Biondi, Rossella Mosti

La Sapienza University of Rome: Luca Fiorentini (in charge), Diego Parisi

Dante 2025, the first digital database dedicated to ancient commentaries on the Divine Comedy is born

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.