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Although its main lines of enquiry and its approaches to textual culture are not always shared by the international mainstream of philological studies, Italian textual criticism is known for its methodological strength and the quality of its output. Publishing reliable critical texts based on exhaustive or extensive knowledge of the textual transmission implies the adoption of a diachronic approach to the textual tradition, the reconstruction of the genealogy of the copies, and a thorough examination of each witness. This article aims to show how digital philology can meet the needs of the Italian philological tradition, starting from the potential development of the Corpus OVI (currently the largest corpus available online for texts of a medieval Romance language), and drawing the scenario of a possible philological research infrastructure.

The spread of the digital approach for representing literary texts encourages interesting analysis in the philological field. Even authorial philology starts to take advantage from the possibilities offered by the new medium — both on a methodological and practical level — as shown by PhiloEditor, a digital tool that compares the two printed editions of Promessi Sposi and allows a typological investigation of the variants. The application offers scientific texts and provides a representational model of their diachrony, particularly effective in teaching. The categorization of the variants achievable by the users in the Laboratorio allows the identification of the corrective strategies behind the changes of the text, that can be evaluated in a quantitative way as well, thanks to the statistical extraction of aggregated data. The project, included within the PRIN ManzoniOnline (PI: G. Raboni), presents innovative results for Manzoni’s studies and performs an important modelling function for other cases of authorial philology.