La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri novamente corretta, spiegata e difesa. Vol. III, Paradiso

[Autom. eng. transl.] The Comedy published in 1791-1792 by the Minorite Baldassarre Lombardi (Vimercate, 1718 – Rome, 1802), the first officially published in Rome, declares a triple purpose right from the title: to amend the text of the sacred poem, which has remained unchanged since 1595; comment on it adequately, not just on a literal level; defend its orthodoxy from the Jesuit's attacks Pompeo Venturi. On an ecdotic level, the criticism of the intangibility of the Vulgate is limited to producing a compilation text, which takes the best of the manuscripts and prints; on an exegetical level Lombardi provides an alternative to the confessional reading because it systematizes the achievements of previous dantology. Republished several times between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the subject of plagiarism, controversy and rewriting, the Lombardina enjoyed for decades an almost undisputed appreciation from the community of Dante scholars and writers, from Foscolo to Carducci. There Italian and European canonization of the Comedy also passes through the glosses of the humble Franciscan: for a long time reading Dante implied reading Lombardi's Dante. However, the relevance of the present edition, the first conducted according to scientific criteria after the eighteenth-century princeps, is not only historical. Understanding how a work was read in the past can in fact help to understand it better in the present. This would be even more necessary for the Comedy, which in the last two decades has been the subject of innovative but often radically conflicting proposals and revisions precisely on an ecdotic and exegetical level.