Una visita alla biblioteca di Marin Sanudo

This essay analyses a Latin poem in elegiac couplets written between 1515 and 1519 by Federico da Porto, describing his visit to Marin Sanudo’s house in Venice. The poem gives us relevant information about the quality and size of Sanudo’s collection of paintings and books; amongst other items, it mentions a rare manuscript of an unpublished work by Dante, which deals with «insanos Veneris […] amores» and has been regarded by scholars as a possible witness of the Fiore, with remarkable consequences on the attribution and the tradition of this work. The verse by Da Porto quotes Ovid’s Ars amatoria, and might be interpreted with reference to the Latin literary tradition: this way, it is possible to read v. 207 as an allusion to Dante’s Rime or, better, Vita nova, whose circulation in northern Italy at the beginning of the XVIth century appears less problematic.