Un nome per il copista del più antico frammento della Divina Commedia: Andrea Lancia

The ff. 127-128 of the manuscript Conventi Soppressi H. 8. 1012, preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Firenze, contain a fragment of the Dante’s Inferno. This study aims at attributing this script to Andrea Lancia’s hand, notary, translator of classics, scribe and annotator of the Divine Comedy, through a comparison with the documents and the books written by the same Lancia. In particular, the script of the fragment shows a perceptible similarity with that of the documents produced between 1314 and 1315 and the handwriting of the ms. C. III. 25 of the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati of Siena, datable within 1320. Therefore, this datum really opens the way to an hypothesis whereby the fragment could be written while Dante was still alive, as Teresa De Robertis carefully presumed.