Welcome to the ItalNet publication of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual database. The production database contains 1849 vernacular texts (21.2 million words, 479,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The beta-test installation of the database under PhiloLogic3 contains 1960 documents (see below). 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.

For more background on the ItalNet consortium and the creation of OVI database, please refer to the following papers which were given at the official inauguration of the project at the Opera del Vocabolario in Florence on 20 May 1998:

• ItalNet, il corpus testuale dell'OVI e il Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (P. Beltrami)
• I progetti delle Universitià di Chicago e di Notre Dame in ambito ItalNet (T. Cachey, M. Olsen, C. Dupont)

For additional project history and examples of how the OVI database has contributed to research projects in various academic disciplines, see:

• Christian Dupont, "The Opera del Vocabolario Italiano Database: Full-Text Searching Early Italian Vernacular Sources on the Web," Italica 78:4 (December 2001): 526-39. [download a PDF version (467 KB) - ©2001 American Association of Teachers of Italian, made available by permission]

Search the Database

New!! Please try our beta-test installation of the OVI database under PhiloLogic3. This contains new documents and is open to ARTFL subscribers and registered OVI users. We are maintaining the existing production installation while we test the new system.

OVI Search Form for ARTFL subscribers.

OVI Search Form for registered users (requires userid and password).

Browse the OVI Bibliography (unrestricted).

For the convenience of European users, Italnet also maintains a mirror site at the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano in Florence.

First time users are encouraged to register with ItalNet in order to obtain a password to perform full-text searches on the OVI database. Users from ARTFL subscribers institutions, including campus dial-up users, do not need to complete the registration unless they would like to be added the OVI database mailing list.

• OVI User Registration Form

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 Christian Dupont cydupont@syr.edu or Mark Olsen mark@barkov.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: mark@gide.uchicago.edu

Christian Dupont, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University - programming assistant and project coordinator
e-mail: cydupont@syr.edu | home page: http://web.syr.edu/~cydupont

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