Giovanni Diodati was born in Geneva in 1576 to a family of merchants from Lucca who had left Italy rather than give up their religion. He was Italian by descent and Genevan by training, and that combination is the whole reason this book exists: he had the language of the country the Reformation had not reached, and he was standing in the city that had become its publishing house. Theodore Beza put him forward for the chair of Hebrew at the age of twenty-one. He became professor of theology in 1606, a pastor in 1608, and succeeded Beza in the theology chair the year after that; in 1618 he went to the Synod of Dort as a Genevan delegate and was one of six men appointed to write up its proceedings.
His Italian Bible was printed at Geneva in 1607. Italy had had vernacular Bibles before — Malermi's of 1471, Brucioli's of 1532 — but they worked from the Latin or leaned heavily on it. Diodati went to the Hebrew and the Greek, and for the New Testament that meant the Greek text Beza had edited in the same city a generation earlier. In 1641 he issued a revised edition with his own explanatory notes attached, and that is the version the reprints descend from. It became, and has remained, the Italian Protestant Bible — which in a country with almost no Protestant readership meant it was carried for four centuries by a very small number of people. He translated the Bible into French as well, in 1644; that one is generally reckoned the weaker, and he would probably not have argued.
The date on the card is worth a sentence, because there isn't one. This text circulates digitally under the label “Diodati 1649”, and 1649 is not an edition — it is the year Diodati died. The two dates that mean something are 1607, when the translation first appeared, and 1641, when he revised it. Which of those a given digital file actually represents is not something this project has established, so the catalogue leaves the year column empty rather than print a number it cannot stand behind. The name is kept as it arrived, because that is what people will search for.
In this reader it is the only Italian Bible, so setting the interface to Italian opens on it — not as a curated pick, the way Reina-Valera 1909 is picked for Spanish, but because the catalogue scan finds nothing else in the language. It has no recorded parent in the lineage rungs, so opening a rung beneath a verse drops straight to the original-language floor marked with ≈. That floor supplies the Textus Receptus for the Greek, and here that is unusually close to the truth: for most editions in this corpus the Receptus stands in for a critical text the translators actually used, but Diodati really was working from a printed Greek text of that family. Its rung chip carries no year, which matches the blank on the card.