The text of the Divina Commedia is that edited by Giorgio Petrocchi and published by Mondadori (Milan, Italy, 1966-67; 2nd ed., Florence, Le Lettere, 1994) for the Edizione Nazionale of the works of Dante sponsored by the Società Dantesca Italiana. The user is advised that this machine-readable version of that text is intended only for scholarly use by individuals. No reproduction of the text for distribution of any kind is permitted, either by the original publisher, by the Dartmouth Dante Project, under whose auspices this aid to research--with the kind permission of Professor Petrocchi--is offered to the community of scholars, or by the Princeton Dante Project. This text is an exact replica of the Petrocchi text; its only divergence occurs in the form of its punctuation, which accords with American rather than Italian usage. The text was copied ca. 1985 by personnel of the Dartmouth Dante Project using a Kurzweil Data Entry Machine at Dartmouth College.

The purpose of this project is to produce an annotated electronic text of Dante's Comedy for instructional and scholarly use. After three years of thought and discussion and the production of a working CD-ROM prototype in June of 1996, in September of 1999 we made available an electronic text of the first cantica of the three-part Comedy. It included the text of the poem in both Italian and English, an Italian voice recording of the poem, the Doré and Nattini illustrations for the Inferno, and historical, philological, visual, and interpretive footnotes. It also included access to the Dartmouth Dante Project (an on-line database of Dante's commentators, from the 1320s to the present), as well as to other Dantean resources on the Web.

The institutional home and "publisher" of the project is Princeton University. The aim of the project is to make serious study of Dante's great poem possible for students and amateur readers alike, of all levels of expertise and having various kinds of interest in the work, by means of a basic electronic edition that will make available in a single locus many of the tools a reader of this text would want to have as an aid to understanding it.

There is and will be no fee for its use on the Internet; it is a service to Dante scholars offered by Princeton University, Robert Hollander, and his collaborators. 8/15/99 (updated 6/6/2011)

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