A collaborative project of the ItalNet consortium

Welcome to the ItalNet publication of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual database. The production database contains 1960 vernacular texts (22.3 million words, 456,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The verse and prose works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers. The OVI database was created to aid in the compilation of an historical dictionary of the Italian language, the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini, (portions of which are now available online). The fully-searchable ItalNet implementation of the OVI database presented here has been produced in order to enable scholars around the world to benefit from this rich textual resource.

Per una traduzione italiana di questa pagina, si veda l'introduzione italiana.

ItalNet is an international consortium founded in 1995 whose mission is to create scholarly Internet resources of literary and historical materials relating to Italian studies. The founding member institutions are the Centro di studi Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, a research center of the Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (CNR), Florence, Italy; the ARTFL Project, Department of Romance Languages, University of Chicago; The William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies, University of Notre Dame; and the Department of Italian Studies, University of Reading. Additional ItalNet collaborative projects may be accessed from the ItalNet Projects Page.

Search the database

Note that there is no charge for using the database, though a modest subscription fee may be implemented in the future. For users at ARTFL subscriber institutions, the OVI database will remain part of the standard ARTFL package and there will be no additional subscription fee. For information about ARTFL and ARTFL institutional subscriptions, consult the following overview.

Please report any problems to the ARTFL Project artfl@artfl.uchicago.edu. We are eager for feedback from users.

Contacts

Pietro Beltrami, Opera del Vocabolario, Florence, Italy - Director, ItalNet
e-mail: beltrami@ovi.cnr.it

Theodore Cachey, Devers Program in Dante Studies, University of Notre Dame - Executive Director, ItalNet
e-mail: tcachey@nd.edu

Mark Olsen, ARTFL Project, University of Chicago - lead database programmer
e-mail: artfl@artfl.uchicago.edu

Christian Dupont, Burns Librarian and Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, Boston College - programming assistance and project coordinator
e-mail: christian.dupont@bc.edu

OVI-TLIO Staff, Opera del Vocabolario, Florence, Italy - creation and management of the textual corpus and TLIO database