A Handbook to Dante Author:Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: de Florentinorum Litteratura Principes fere synchroni Scrip- tores denuo in lucem prodeunt. Cura et Studio G. C. Galletti, Florence, 1847, 4to. Bruni's work ... more »was first printed at Perugia, by S. Zecchini's heirs, 1672, 4to, and is prefixed to many editions of The Divine Comedy. Manetti's was first published by Menus, Florence, 1747. Filelfo's wretched work was printed by Moreno, Florence, 1828, 8vo. § 2. Modern Biographers Of Dante. -- Innumerable are the names of those who in recent times have written on Dante's life, both in Italy and abroad. It is no part of our purpose to give a full list of these here, but merely to point out the principal and most important among them. Having collected nearly all the documents known up to that time, Giuseppe Pelli, a Florentine patrician, laid the foundations for a scientific biography of the great poet. But, if Pelli showed great diligence in his work, he, on the other hand, failed to exercise the necessary criticism, drawing his materials from every quarter, without despising even the impostures of the miserable Filelfo. The Marquis Dionisi of Verona and Count Carlo Troya, in their writings, made important contributions, partly of things that had previously been too much neglected, to the history of Dante's life and times. Great and well-deserved success attended Count Cesare Balbo's Life of Dante, hitherto the best work of this kind. Superficial and tiresome, on the contrary, is Melchiorre Missirini's bulky volume, which, perhaps, just because it is so light and superficial, had the good luck to reach afourth edition. Resuming and completing Pelli's work, Pietro Fraticelli wrote a Life of Dante (Storia della Vita di Dante Alighieri), more important on account of the documents contained in it than of the work of the ...« less