PETRARCH
No authority for Petrarch’s life is equal to his own letters, published complete in the edition of Fracassetti, 1859-63. An English translation has been announced. There are recent biographies corresponding to the requirements of modern research by Geiger, 1874, and in the first volume of Koerting’s Geschichte der Litteratur Italiens, 1878. Petrarch’s position and resources as a scholar have been thoroughly investigated by Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’Humanisme, 1892. The best commentary is Leopardi’s, always printed with the current Florentine edition of the Canzoniere. The most critical edition is Mestica’s, 1896. The best literary criticism is Zumbini’s Studi sul Petrarca, 1895.
BOCCACCIO
Koerting’s life of Boccaccio in the second volume of his Geschichte is the best; and the English reader may consult Symonds, Giovanni Boccaccio, 1895.
ITALIAN NOVEL
Perhaps the fullest account of the Italian novelists in an English book is that in Dunlop’s History of Fiction, as edited by Wilson, 1888. See also Papanti, Catalogo dei Novelieri italiani, 1871, and the notices prefixed to the specimens translated in Thomas Roscoe’s Italian Novelists, 1832.
ITALIAN DRAMA
The fullest accounts of individual Italian dramatists will be found in Ginguené. The beginning of the Italian drama is investigated by D’Ancona in his Origini del Teatro in Italia, 1891; see also the volumes (iv.-vii.) devoted to Italy in Klein’s Geschichte des Dramas. D’Ancona has written a monograph on the Sacre Rappresentazioni (see p. 226). The Commedia dell’ Arte (pp. 305-307) is treated in Scherillo’s monograph with this title, in Maurice Sand’s Masques et Bouffons, and in Symonds’s preface to his translation of the memoirs of Carlo Gozzi, 1892.