Cristoforo Landino published his edition and commentary on the works of Horace in 1482 in Florence, with a dedication to Guidobaldo di Montefeltro. The printer was Antonio di Bartolommeo Miscomini. The book eventually became the property of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), whose numerous annotations line the margins of its pages. Like his contemporaries, Tasso was steeped in the Latin classics, which he used as a foundation to his own poetic output, and which he studied carefully. It was, however, a result of medieval preservation of antiquity's best works that Renaissance poets like Tasso, not to mention printers such as Miscomini, were able to find legible, accurate copies of the masterworks of the Latin antiquity to analyze and print. Landino's Horace represents the sort of early printing produced in Italy in the late fifteenth century. Printing arose in the mid fifteenth century in Mainz with Guttenberg, and spread throughout Germany, then to Italy via Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who worked at the abbey of St. Scholastica at Subiaco. Printing, of course, revolutionized the production of classical works, making obsolete the old process of copying out manuscripts by hand. But the care evinced in bringing Latin manuscripts to publication after the mid-fifteenth century speaks to the crucial work of cultural preservation accomplished by medieval scriptoria. (commentary by J. Pucci)