Dante's Divine Comedy First Printed

1472

A press in Foligno produced the first printed edition of Dante's Commedia, a century and a half after the poem's completion. Vernacular literature had entered the print economy. Within a generation, Italian would be fixed in a form Tuscan schoolboys and Venetian merchants could share, its spelling newly standardized. The printed edition made Dante's Tuscan dialect accessible across the peninsula, accelerating the process by which Tuscan became literary Italian.