NDP

Naples Dante Project (NDP) is funded by PRIN 2022, and is led by professor Gennaro Ferrante. The project aims to constitute an online aggregator of databases primarily focusing on the manuscript, printed and illustrative tradition of Dante’s Commedia. NDP is developing two main research fields: text and image. As for the text, it will launch eCommedia, an image archive and descriptive catalogue of the whole manuscript tradition of Dante’s poem, which will add to the already existing catalogue of the Illuminated Dante Project (IDP) further datasets of extant manuscripts and on Commedia’s manuscript fragment tradition (Fragments of Commedia-FraC). Furthermore, eCommedia will promote HTR-based transcriptions of the corpus as well as automated collations, in order to achieve a digital recensio of Dante’s masterwork. That will be the preliminary step to a digital scholarly edition of the poem. Beside the earliest manuscript tradition, NDP will provide scholars and users with Dante Critical Texts, an online comparating tool of modern scholarly editions of Commedia from Karl Witte (1862) to Paolo Trovato (2021-). As for the image, NDP will expand its research on ancient Dante iconography by creating IlluDant, an image archive and descriptive catalogue of illuminated manuscripts, printed books and in-series drawings of the Commedia from 14th to 16th century. In the coming years, even after the conclusion of the PRIN funding, the principal investigator will continue the development of the project, with possible collaborations with other Dante-related initiatives coordinated by other researchers and developed both within and beyond Federico II, in a national and international context, either in the absence of extraordinary funding or through participation in partnered or competitively funded projects.