Un caso precoce di tradizione indiretta del "Milione" di Marco Polo: il "Liber de introductione loquendi" di Filippino da Ferrara O.P.

In the first half of the Fourteenth century, the Dominican Filippino da Ferrara wrote the Liber de introductione loquendi, a Latin conversation handbook for the Order of Preachers. Among the sources of the treatise appears the Milione of Marco Polo, from which Brother Filippino drew on sixteen stories. The present work offers the results of the first full collation between those tales and the most reliable versions of the Milione: they have borne out the close relationship, already assumed in previous critical studies, with Z, one of the most authoritative versions of the Marco Polo’s book. This relationship is here also supported by the discovery of new lexical and formal items in common. The few documents about the life of Filippino attest at least a stay in Venetian convent of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, where the Dominican might have had access to the Millione.