Vita nuova di Dante Alighieri con xv canzoni del medesimo, e la vita di esso Dante scritta da Giovanni Boccaccio.

Two works in one volumes, 8° (157×103 mm). Collation: *⁴, A-G⁸, H⁴; A-E⁸. [8], 116, [4]; 80 pages. Italic and roman types. The second work opens with its own title-page: Origine, vita, studii, e costumi del chiarissimo Dante Allighieri. With the printer's device on both title-pages and several woodcut initials. Later vellum with manuscript title on spine. Some marginal foxing, but a good copy.

Provenance: 'Di Liondo Rustici e de [fratelli?]' (ownership inscription on the title-page);Giuseppe Martini (ex-libris); Livio Ambrogio collection.

First edition of both parts (prose and verse) of Dante's Vita Nuova, edited by Niccolò Carducci and dedicated by the printer Bartolomeo Sermartelli to the Florentine nobleman Bartolomeo Panciatichi. The volume also includes fifteen love and moral poems (Canzoni amorose et morali) and, with separate title-page, Boccaccio's Vita diDante.
The lyric part of the Vita Nuova as well as the additional poems were taken from the celebrated Giunta edition of early Tuscan poets issued in 1527, while the prose part (printed here for the first time) was derived from a manuscript owned by Carducci himself (today at the Laurenziana Library in Florence, Laur. Pl. 40 42).
The Vita Nuova, composed between 1293 and 1295, is the first work surely written by Dante. It is remarkable that it was printed more than a century after the Commediaand that, after this first edition, it was reprinted again only in 1723 (in the collection Prose di Dante Alighieri e di Messer Gio. Boccaccio).
Even though the lyric part of the work, as stated, had already appeared partially or fully in the edition of the Commediaprinted by Pietro Piasi in 1491 and in the Giunta anthology of 1527, the Vita Nuova was the last of Dante's works, with the only exception of the Latin eglogues and the letters, to come to print.