RePIM is the development, in the form of a computerized database, of the incipit list of Italian poetry set to music conceived by Lorenzo Bianconi. Begun in 1977, following the publication of Il Nuovo Vogel, and funded by a grant from the Swiss National Fund, the list was completed in paper form in the 1980s, with the collaboration of Angelo Pompilio and Antonio Vassalli. The project originated from the conviction that in secular vocal music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the poetic component has a structural and artistic importance equal to that of the music, and thus holds the utmost importance for the historical and critical understanding of the work of art. However, as is well known, musical sources only rarely identify the author of the poetic text; therefore, the poet’s identity must be sought by collating musical sources with the rich array of coeval poetic sources, both manuscript and printed. RePIM, from its very beginning, has addressed this basic scholarly need: to identify, through the systematic perusal of poetic sources, as large a number as possible of authors of poetry used by musicians in the secular and spiritual vocal production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Literary sources
Census. The first task consisted of compiling a bibliography of books of poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This task has been extended to include manuscripts as well as modern editions from the eighteenth century to the present, by consulting printed worklists and catalogs, as well as OPAC library catalogs. The bibliographic search took into account not only books of poetry but also volumes of other kinds (letters, reports of performances, plays, treatises, essays) that might contain poetry. This survey made it possible to identify about 1500 literary sources. The bibliography does not claim to be an exhaustive list of the editions of poetry books published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but it does offer a substantial repertory of sources that represent a significant proportion of the lyric poetry for the period under consideration.
Most of the sources of poetry identified in the bibliography were consulted in situ or in reproduction. For each source, an analytical bibliographical record was compiled containing a complete description of the title page, salient data from the dedicatory letter, a summary of the contents of the preliminary pages, a description of the physical characteristics, and finally specific data on the copy examined.

Identification of texts. To identify the texts set to music, we first used the index of first lines of the individual collections surveyed in Il Nuovo Vogel. We then searched the complete index of texts set to music ̶ now extended to include the first two lines ̶ derived from the description of all the music collections surveyed by the project, including anthologies and miscellanies (i.e., the Sammlungen of the old Vogel and the Recueils imprimés of RISM) as well as manuscripts.
Working from this index of incipits, the sources of poetry included in our census were manually browsed page by page to ascertain the presence of poetic texts set to music and to identify the poet. As a rule, the matching was based on the first two lines of each poem; occasionally the incipits of individual stanzas or other lines within each composition were checked.

Musical sources
In the initial phase of the project (until around 1990), the only sources taken into account were those included in Il Nuovo Vogel (EMIL VOGEL - ALFRED EINSTEIN - FRANÇOIS LESURE - CLAUDIO SARTORI, Bibliografia della musica italiana vocale profana pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700, Pomezia, Staderini-Minkoff, 1977). After the computer archive was set up, the project was expanded to include all musical sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both manuscript and printed, that contain Italian verse, starting with the following repertories:
- EMIL VOGEL, Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens, aus den Jahren 1500-1700, Hildesheim, G. Olm, 1962 (la sola parte delle raccolte antologiche);
- FRANÇOIS LESURE, Recueils imprimés, XVI^e-XVII^e siècles, München, Henle, 1960 (RISM B/I);
- KNUD JEPPESEN, La Frottola, Aarhus, Universitetsforlaget; København, Einar Munksgaard, 1968-1970;
- IAIN FENLON - JAMES HAAR, The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century: Sources and Interpretation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1988 (rist. 2013);
- RISM Catalog (https://opac.rism.info/).
Additional bibliographical information was obtained from current musicological literature, especially essays with a focus on sources.
There are 3559 musical sources surveyed in RePIM. For each printed edition, the entry lists all preserved copies, a total of 10,065 exemplars.
A bibliographical description is given for each musical source, which includes: a complete transcription of the title page, the relevant data from the dedicatory letter (in some cases with a complete transcription of the text), an analytical description of the contents, the physical characteristics, and finally the list of copies, showing the surviving partbooks (e.g., C.A.T.B.5. [compl.]) and current location.

Digital reproductions
For all sources in the census (musical and literary), a systematic survey was conducted to identify online availability of full digital reproductions. 3182 copies of musical sources (from 2156 editions) and 1389 copies of literary sources (from 816 editions) can currently be found online. Overall, of the 5173 editions surveyed, 2973, or just under 60 percent, are available in digital form.
The 900 sources in the Museo internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna were digitized by the RePIM project.

Incipit
From investigations undertaken to identify the texts, it was immediately apparent that a comparison that was limited to the first words of the text, or even to the entire first line, were not sufficient to ascertain the identity of the poetic text: it was necessary to extend the comparison to at least the second line, and in some cases to take into account the subsequent lines as well. Published lists of poetic texts often report only the first line, and sometimes only the opening words. In order to extend the textual incipit to include the second line, it was necessary to consult as many musical sources as possible; roughly 70 percent of the entire repertoire was available for consultation. In RePIM, ‘incipit’ should thus be understood to mean the first two lines.
Printed music editions of the sixteenth century are usually produced in four to six partbooks, as many as the number of singers needed to perform the music. Each of the musical compositions typically occupies an entire page of a partbook. The physical size of the printed page thus sets the standard size of a sixteenth-century vocal composition.
However, the length of the text in music fluctuates significantly over the decades. In the first half of the sixteenth century, texts ranged between 50 and 120 words; in the second half of the century the number of words was reduced to between 30 and 70. In contrast, the texts set as solo vocal compositions in the early seventeenth century can often exceed 120 words. Composers also changed their approach to poetic form over time: in the first half of the sixteenth century a madrigal (that is, a musical composition) could set an entire sonnet (ca. 120 words) as a single part, occupying a single page of a partbook, while in the second half of the century it was instead typically set as two distinct parts, the two quatrains (ca. 70 words) in the first part and the two tercets (ca. 50 words) in the second (ca. 50 words), each part occupying a single printed page.
The choice of kind of text to be set depends on prevailing tastes and the stylistic choices of individual composers. They had the freedom to select a complete text or just a portion of it (a few lines, a stanza of a sestina, a portion of a stanza) in order to create a particular assemblage of lines to set to music.
Another significant aspect in the tradition of texts set to music concerns the presence of textual variants in the sources, both musical and literary. The variants range widely in type, from the substitution of one or more words to the rewriting of entire portions, the addition or deletion of lines, the repetition of lines or portions of a line, and even the insertion of lines from other poems.
In order to trace both the different segmentations of the texts and the variants, an expanded incipit index was set up that allows the segments of the text and the variants to be linked back to the original text. To align the parts of musical compositions with the corresponding portions of the literary text, it was necessary to establish a segmentation of the poetic text into sections corresponding to the sections of the musical composition and to assign an incipit to each of them. For example, Petrarch’s sonnet Zefiro torna e ’l bel tempo rimena can be set as three parts, and so three incipits were included in the incipit list: "Zefiro torna e ’l bel tempo rimena" (quatrain), "Ridono i prati, e ’l ciel si rasserena" (quatrain) and "Ma per me, lasso, tornano i più gravi" (tercet).
This expanded index of incipits has a total of 66,538 items: 55,538 are from musical compositions (each part is counted as a single composition) and 11,000 are from poetic texts (from 7480 poems). Of the 55,538 musical compositions, 20,764 compositions, just under 37 percent, can now be linked to poetic sources.

Transcription of complete texts
The work carried out thus far highlighted the need to include complete texts in order to trace more accurately both the segmentation of the compositions and the variational phenomena mentioned above. The complete text is also indispensable for conducting linguistic and stylistic investigations of texts set to music, and for reconstructing the various poetic and musical choices in this repertoire.
To provide support for these kinds of investigations, the complete transcription of the texts set to music was initiated in the past year. To date, complete poetic texts of 13,700 musical compositions (slightly more than 25 percent of the total) have been transcribed, mainly from madrigal collections published between 1580 and 1620 (with an emphasis on editions available in digital form), and more than 6000 texts from literary sources (slightly more than 80 percent of the texts). Some of the texts were obtained from editions available online and others were transcribed directly from the original sources. ì
For the poems transcribed directly from the sources, criteria from the edition of Giovan Battista Marino’s Rime amorose (edited by Ottavio Besomi and Alessandro Martini, Modena, Panini, 1987) were adopted. The texts obtained from the online editions reproduce the form found in the edition.

Funding and research locations
The project was begun in 1977 thanks to a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Starting in 1980 it was housed at the Department of Music and Performing Arts (now Department of the Arts) of the University of Bologna. From 1985 to the early 1990s it received financial support from the Institute of Renaissance Studies in Ferrara as part of the activities of the Madrigal Archive coordinated by Thomas Walker. Since 1998 the research activity has conducted under the auspices of the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna. The current website was developed as part of the “RePIM in LOD (Linked Open Data)” project, partially funded in 2021 and currently hosted by I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (for further information see the article: PAOLO BONORA – ANGELO POMPILIO, RePIM in LOD: semantic technologies to manage, preserve, and disseminate knowledge about Italian secular music and lyric poetry from the 16th-17th centuries, «Umanistica digitale», n. 14, 2022, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/15568).