A selection of editions of Italian literature, mainly taken from the Bardi Library, are on display here. The fine and valuable collection was made available to the teachers of the Institute ever since 1892 and located in a room of its own in the headquarters of Piazza S. Marco, where the Section of Philosophy and Philology had moved in 1877. The study and teaching of literature and Italian language had among its scholars figures such as Adolfo Bartoli, of which there is a collection of works by Dante, Guido Mazzoni, Pio Rajna, and Ernesto Giacomo Parodi, to whose private library, acquired in 1923, belongs one of the selected volumes.
The specimens range from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth. The second sixteenth century edition of the Convivio is compared to the edition of the Divina Commedia of 1817, abundantly illustrated by "tables in copper" of neoclassical taste. The display includes also the Latin text of the precious Genealogia by Boccaccio of 1511, the Italian translation by Trissino of Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, the Decameronian Lexicon by Alunni and the Dialogue by Manetti on the locations of Dante's Inferno. The pungent considerations by Tassoni on the rhymes of Petrarca are a counterpoint to the homage of Anton Francesco Doni to the Tre Corone, depicted in the front matter of the Prose antiche in an image of high symbolic value. The selection is completed by the 1644 Parisian edition of Goffredo ovvero La Gierusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso and a richly illustrated eighteenth-century edition of Ariosto's works.
