The Archivio Caetani, now owned by the Fondazione Camillo Caetani, is one of the most important and interesting family archives that have been preserved in Rome. In addition to numerous old documents, it also contains many letters and papers of writers and scholars of the sixteenth century, and a certain number of valuable literary manuscripts. The most famous among them is the Caetani Codex of Dante's Divine Comedy, which has been well known to Dante scholars since the last century and which was made available, along with the numerous Latin glosses accompanying the text, through a beautiful and accurate edition published by Don Gelasio Caetani in 1930. The manuscript is written on parchment in a beautiful calligraphic hand of the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century and contains in its margin numerous Latin glosses.

In 1470 the fifteen year old Angelo Poliziano published his first major work, a Latin hexameter translation of Iliad 2 dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici. Poliziano was motivated to write this translation not only by a sincere and enduring interest in Homeric poetry, but also by a desire to display his extraordinary poetic and linguistic talent and thereby to win the attention and perhaps the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici. The translation of Iliad 2 was received with lavish praise, and Poliziano was soon invited into the Medici household where, under Lorenzo's official patronage, he continued to work on the translation. In 1472, he completed Iliad 3; in 1474, Iliad 4; and in 1475, at age 20, Iliad 5, the last book he was to do. What is most interesting is that the style of books 2 and 3 differs substantially from the style of books 4 and 5.