La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri manoscritta da Boccaccio .

Three parts in one volume, large octavo (247 x 170 mm). Printed on dark olive paper. xxxi, [1], 612, [8] pages. Frontespiece with the engraved medallion portrait of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, after Giuseppe Bossi. On the title-page engraved vignette depicting an elephant; on p. [613] engraved vignette reproducing in facsimile the first tercet of the Canto II of the Inferno, from the manuscript employed for the edition. Late nineteenth-century blind-tooled red morocco, over pasteboards. Boards framed within a richly blind-tooled frame, large lozenge at the centre. Spine with four raised bands, gilt-tooled, title in gilt lettering. Marbled pastedowns and flyleaves. The original wrappers preserved inside. A very good copy, leaves partly unopened. A few paper flaws, damaged the outer margin of the penultimate leaf, without any loss. Waterstaining to the lower margin of the first leaves.

Provenance: Libreria Antiquaria Mediolanum, Milan (small label on the verso of the front flyleaf).

Rare edition privately printed by Luigi Fantoni in his residence in Roveta, near Bergamo, and dedicated Ai cultori del divino Poema. Textually, the edition is based on a copy, transcribed by Fantoni himself, of the celebrated mid-fourteenth-century manuscript of the Commedia, which Boccaccio had sent as a gift to Petrarch between 1351 and 1353 (Biblioteca Vaticana, ms Vat. lat. 3199. The edition was printed on different shades of paper; Some copies are – as here - on dark olive paper.