Abstract

The essay analyzes the textual tradition of Naldo Naldi’s Volaterrais, demonstrating that one of the witnesses of the poem belonged to the library of Federico di Montefeltro, and highlighting how the cover letters sent by Naldo Naldi to the Duke of Urbino and to some of his most influent collaborators reveal a problem in the chronology concerning the composition of the poem. Although past scholars claimed that the Volaterrais was composed to celebrate the victory of Montefeltro over the rebels of Volterra, this paper shows that Naldi wrote the poem to promote himself in a period (between the mid-seventies and the beginning of the eighties) when he was in search of a professional position far from Florence and outside the Medici circle