ABSTRACT
The Anonimo Fiorentino commences his commentary by immediately tackling a subject of great importance: the question of the language in which the Commedia is written, the vernacular. The reflection on the inferiority of the vernacular as compared to Latin had a great weight in the dialogue between Boccaccio and Petrarch regarding the Commedia and, even before then, in the confrontation between Giovanni del Virgilio and Dante himself. The sentence passed by Petrarch-Lactantius on the “indirect and figural language” of poetry, inserted by the Anonimo Fiorentino at the margins of a single of Dante’s verses – and in a substantially incongruous way, as noted – thus reduces in the end to a simple ‘learned’ citation, called up almost passively. The citations from the Fragmenta in the commentary of the Anonimo Fiorentino might indeed have a completely different meaning.
