Dante Alighieri


Dante Alighieri. Vita nuova, 1513.

This volume includes a selection of poems by Dante and several other authors as well as the Vita nuova, the poet’s first prosimetrum. The manuscript was copied in the first year of the papacy of Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, 1475–1521), who, despite enhancing Rome as a center of Renaissance culture and the Papacy as a force in European politics, drained his treasury and helped provoke the Reformation.

Dante composed the Vita nuova (New Life), around 1293. It is his compendium of earlier poems, written in an ostensibly autobiographical prose framework. The Vita nuovo records Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, who later appears as his “guide” in the Paradiso, but whose historical identity has never been established.


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