Famous first Aldine edition of 1502 of the Terze rime, or Dante's Comedy.

Second impression with the Aldine anchor on the last card added during printing in a limited number of copies. According to Renouard and Gamba, this is the first time that the famous Aldo brand is used (Gamba, 379; Renouard, p. 34), while it had in fact already appeared two months earlier in the second volume of the Poetae Christiani (June, 1502). "First edition in portable format... in italic character due to Aldo senior and called italic by those beyond the Alps and by us Petrarchan because it was used in the edition of Petrarch's Canzoniere. The engraver and founder of the characters used by the Aldi was Francesco da Bologna" (Mambelli, 17). In addition to the addition of the anchor in the process of being printed, other corrections were included during publication, including the name of the author in A1v, which here remains incorrectly written as "Alaghieri". This is the first and only time that Dante's Divine Comedy is given the title Le terza rime by will of the curator Pietro Bembo, whose father Bernardo was the owner of the Dante manuscript donated by Boccaccio to Petrarch (now Vat. Lat. 3199). The edition is also important for the textual innovations found both here and in Petrarch's Aldine of 1501, also edited by Bembo; for example, an apostrophe is used to indicate an elision and the is accented to indicate a meaning other than e. The manuscript of the Comedy used for the edition, donated by Boccaccio to Petrarch and present in the very rich library of his father Bernardo Bembo, is identified in the Vat. Lat. 3199 which was then owned by Fulvio Orsini, copied by a copyist in Florence around the middle of the 14th century and which came into the hands of Petrarch between 1351 and 1353. Pietro Bembo prepared a copy of his own, the current Vat. Lat. 3197, during a stay at Ercole Strozzi's villa near Ferrara, from 6 July 1501 to 26 July 1502. With this edition Bembo made a clear break with the tradition of printing the Comedy, starting from the title Le terza rime and even more so with the choice, certainly shared by Aldo, to get rid of the commentary by Cristoforo Landino which had established itself as an essential companion to Dante's text starting from the first Florentine edition of 1481.