After about twenty-five years of hard work, Professor La Luna is going to publish the critical edition of the manuscript 1457, MS Ital 54, Houghton Library, Harvard University, entitled: “Comincia la prima parte della cantica overo comedia chiamata i[n]ferno del chiarissimo poeta Dante Alinghieri di Firenze”. The codex, copied in 1457 by Bartolomeus filius Andree Maççonis de Luce and by an anonymous scribe, contains Canti (Songs) from Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, accompanied by a marginal commentary written in 1375 by the so-called Falso Boccaccio, a Florentine scholar who imitated Giovanni Boccaccio’s Commentary on Dante’s
Divine Comedy.

The only book on this topic, entitled Chiose sopra Dante, was published in Florence in 1846 by George John Warren Vernon. It contains a diplomatic transcription of the Riccardiano 1028 codex and it is not easy to find and very complicated to read: the words are not separated; the Canti of Dante’s masterpiece are incomplete; the capital letters are not used; the abbreviations and the interpunctuation are left as they are in the codex; the mistakes are not corrected and the lacunas are not integrated.

The publication of the Harvard manuscript with “conSenso publishing” will constitute a relevant contribution toward the future publication of the national critical edition of the entire Commentary attributed to Falso Boccaccio, which is reproduced in twenty different codices belonging to the same family that are stored in libraries and archives located in Denmark, England, France, Italy, and in the US. La Luna already started working on this new long-term project together with Italian scholar, Francesca Mazzanti.