The Italian Poetry in Latin Project was conceived in 1999 with the aim of locating, assessing, collating and computerising Latin poems produced in Italy or in Italian cultural environments during the period starting from around the birth of Dante until the mid-16th century.

Poems by famous authors and anonymous texts of all kinds, published in printed editions (occasionally recent and painstaking, but more often antiquated and unmethodical), or transferred from library manuscripts and paper editions having a limited circulation (for example dissertations, which until a few decades ago were still being written on typewriters), or left unseen in the folios of codices: all of these texts are gradually being transferred into computerised archives, linked to an internal word search engine that consents instant access and direct enquiry.

The choice of examining a temporal segment, together with the close analogy of the criteria employed for textual criticism, plus the characteristics of the programme’s structure and modality of function, put this work on the path that, beginning from CD-ROM Poesis 2. CD-Rom dei testi della poesia latina (Bologna 1999, 1995¹) and PoetriaNova. A CD-Rom of Latin Medieval Poetry, 650-1250 A. D. (Firenze 2010, 2001¹) — respectively dedicated to Latin poetry of ancient and medieval ages —, brought at last to the Musisque Deoque website. Thus the field open to a rapid and secure intertextual search is being greatly extended, spanning eighteen centuries of poetic production, from the remote origins of Rome’s literary language up to the Italian flourishing Humanism and Renaissance.