On the occasion of Dantedì 2025, the Ministry of Culture's national holiday dedicated to Dante Alighieri instituted in 2020, Italian Scholars of Dante have created Corpus CoDA (Corpus of ancient Dante comments), the first searchable digital database of ancient commentaries on the poet's Divine Comedy . The online archive is a free resource administered by Vittorio Celotto (Univesità di Napoli Federico II), Diego Dotto (CNR-OVI), Luca Fiorentini (Sapienza Università di Roma), Cristiano Lorenzi Biondi (CNR-OVI), and Zeno Verlato (CNR-OVI) and is accessible here.
The Corpus CoDA aims to collect all the commentaries on The Divine Comedy, in the vernacular or in Latin, dating back to the end of the 15th century. It exhaustively documents the analytical study of lexicon in the various forms of ancient Dante exegesis including organic commentaries on the poem, or studies of its single units, composite systems of annotations, compendiums in prose or verse, and public lessons. Presently the database contains 67 texts (more than half of the the entire corpus), comprising of 4,975,798 lexical occurrences and 171,948 graphic forms.
All of the database's texts are accompanied by brief illustrative cards, collected in the first digital bibliography of Dante's commentaries (BCD - Bibliografia dei Commenti Danteschi), which are accessible here within the LexiCad ecosystem, created by Salvatore Arcidiacono for the development of web-based dictionaries. Corpus CoDA is one of the research tools that forms the Naples Dante Project (NPD), coordinated by Gennaro Ferrante (Università di Napoli “Federico II”), the richest online aggregator of Dante's textual tradition, from The Divine Comedy to the ancient commentaries on the poem and Dante's minor works.
CoDA's principal aim is to enrich digital research conditions, particularly as they relate to the fields of philology, history of the language and the history of literary origins. The database makes pioneering use of the fundamental editions and studies that the Censimento ed Edizione Nazionale dei Commenti Danteschi (directed by Andrea Mazzucchi) has developed. Furthermore, the database exists to enhance the experience of accessing the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano's digital lexicography (overseen by Paolo Squillacioti, Director of the OVI), which offers the largest database available today within the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini.
Corpis CoDA is only the first of a number of tools that will combine to create a larger project dedicated to ancient Dantean exegises, which also includes the creation of a searchable database specifically for research of an exegetical nature. Currently the project is supported by PRIN 2022 ("Progetti di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale," the Italian Ministry of Education's programme that supports university research projects and proposals), entitled, "Corpus dei Commenti Danteschi Antichi (CoDA). Strumenti digitali per la lessicografia e l’esegesi della Commedia," (prot. 2022RFC5ZR). It is operated collaboratively by the Università di Napoli Federico II, La Sapienza Università di Roma and the Spoke 3 Online Digital Archive.
The Società Dantesca Italiana notes that the Corpus CoDa would not be have been possible without the collaboration of Andrea Boccellari (IT manager) and researchers Roberta Di Giorgi (CNR-OVI), Giulia Lucci (Università di Napoli Federico II), Rossella Mosti (CNR-OVI), Diego Parisi (La Sapienza Università di Roma), and Valentina Sferragatta (Università di Napoli Federico II).