Esteemed University of Chicago professor Paolo Cherch donated a trove of books to Casa Italia in Stone Park before he passed away in April. Thanks to the donation, the shelves at the Florence Roselli Library in the Italian Cultural Center at the Casa now contain the 21-volume “Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana,” four volumes of the “Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana” and one volume of “Elementi di storia della lingua italiana.”
Published in Torino from 1961 to 2002, the GDLI exceeds the volume count of the Oxford English Dictionary and almost equals the 600,000 words in the OED. It is the largest and most comprehensive historical dictionary of Italian, documenting words from their origins to the present through extensive literary quotations.
