The literary beginnings of the Italian vernacular are traditionally identified at the imperial court of Frederick II in Sicily, where a remarkable group of poets wrote love lyrics and innovated a new form – the sonnet – that would have a lasting impact on European verse. At seigneurial courts across the north of the peninsula, by contrast, the prevalent literary vernacular was Occitan. Recent archival discoveries, such as the Ravenna fragment, have helped to provide a glimpse of the earliest literary production in the north. Even if these fragments witness a beginning that did not develop into a literary tradition, they nonetheless represent valuable evidence of the complexity and texture of the earliest literary expressions in the Italian vernacular. This essay examines some of these fragments or, adopting Armando Petrucci’s term, ‘traces’, and highlights the sharp contrast in material terms that is found in the later Tuscan ‘songbooks’ or canzonieri, which witness almost all of the surviving lyric poetry of the Sicilian School. The essay concludes by looking at how Dante, after the comprehensive analysis of vernacular literature in the De vulgari eloquentia, writes a poem that overtly signals itself as a new vernacular beginning.