THE FIRST BOOK PRINTED IN ITALY. They left Germany while still young, in the 1460s, with a specific destination, perhaps already Rome. Presumably called by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the German printers Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who were clerics of the dioceses of Mainz and Cologne respectively, came down from Germany between 1464 and 1465 to go to Rome and set up a printing press there. The unexpected death of Nicholas of Cusa in the summer of 1464, and perhaps other reasons that escape us today, convinced the two German clerics to stop in Subiaco, in one of the most important Benedictine monasteries. In Santa Scolastica they found a rich library and monks, mostly German, willing to collaborate in the enterprise of starting that “divina ars...artificialiter scribendi” in Italy, in the cradle of Christianity and humanism. Here they worked for a few years, choosing to adapt their graphic sensibility to the Italian one: which meant redesigning the Gothic character adapting it to the roundness of the Roman. The true innovation of printing is all in the design/realization of an alphabet with movable characters that could be shaped to the infinite combinations created by the letters, to give life to infinite pages/books. After an initial experiment of a few sheets intended for the study of young people, that Donatus vanished into thin air, they sent three works by Lactantius to print in October 1465. The text was not chosen at random, because those works responded perfectly to the cultural and religious climate of those years, between Ciceronianism, Christian providentialism, fusion between classical and Christian culture. They printed 275 copies, over 40 of which still survive. Some, like the present one, were enriched in Rome with a standardized illustrative set that included the canonical decoration with bianchi girari of the capitals, decoration made in one of the many workshops of miniaturists very active in the capital. But Subiaco had to give way to Rome, where their new protector Giovanni Andrea Bussi was anxiously waiting to illustrate the new wonderful invention to the world - which had always gathered there. They took with them all the copies of the incunabula printed in Subiaco that were theirs and moved to Rome at the end of 1467. And already in November the bishop of Massa Leonardo Dati declared that he had purchased in Rome a copy of De civitate Dei by St. Augustine, "from those same Teutons who live there, who do not use writing books but print them with forms". The Lactantius of Subiaco is without doubt the most famous book in the history of Italian typography. The first dated book ever printed in Italy and one of only four editions printed by Gutenberg's students in their first printing house, that of Subiaco, which is also the first office outside Germany to have a printing house equipped with tools entirely made on site. The importance of this edition also lies in the fact that it is «the second Italian printing with Greek characters. The use of Greek characters had become necessary because Lactantius in De divinis institutionibus had reported in the original language some quotations, such as those of the Asclepius or Lógos téleios; however, the Greek types must have been supplied, or manufactured, only during the composition, since the first leaves still show the corresponding spaces blank, while later the Greek text alternates regularly with the Latin one» (S. Gentile - C. Gilly, Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto, Florence 2001, pp. 160-61). Goff L1; HC 9806*; Pr 3288; BMC IV 2; IGI 5619. This copy is sold with a Certificate of Free Circulation.