The Italian branch of the Seven Sages is usually reffered to as Version I, or the Versio Italico, in scholarship, and the texts are often titled Il Libro dei Sette Savi di Roma. This is an umbrella version used to refer to a group of six different Italian redactions. While the Version I pattern is assumed to stem originally from the Version A tradition, the Versio Italico versions evolved sepately from the Italian Version A texts. The Italian witness to the Seven Sages tradition are therefore split into two distinct groups.
Within the Versio Italico branch, the six redactions are:
These six versions redactions are often split into distinct sub-groups. For example, the first three of these texts constitute the 'rama antico', or old branch of Version I. Il Libro dei Sette Savi (C), is one of the three texts that forms the closely related 'ramo italico antico', the old branch of the Italian Seven Sages texts, alongside the Latin Versio Italica historiae septem sapientum (L), and Italian Storia d'una Crudele Matrigna (M). Like both of these redactions, Libro (C) has fourteen, rather than the expected fifteen, stories. The storytelling contest begins with the sages' first story, Canis, rather than a story told by the empress; her story Senescalcus is omitted entirely, and she tells six rather than seven stories. Some scholarship (Rajna) suggests this omission may have been made out of prudishness (as Senescalcus is the most explicit of the tales usually found in the Version A pattern); whatever the reason, the change necessitated a reordering of the narrative components of the text (see story order, below).
D'Agostino (2022) explores the complex relationship between the three 'ramo antico' redactions at length. Through close analysis of the textual variations across all manuscript witness of the three redactions, D'Agostino suggests that the Latin Versio Italica (or some specific manuscript witnesses of that version) may have been the source for the Storia d'una Crudele Matrigna, as many scholars have suggested (Paris (1876),Rajna (1880), etc.). However, D'Agostino does not concur with Gaston Paris' insistance that the extant Latin text was the source for the Libro (C) as well, instead suggesting that C and L both derived from a shared (lost) source, with intervening textual variation, cross-contamination, and mediation (p. 271-75).
the first four of these narratives all give the prince the unusual name 'Stefano' (something shared with one of the Italian Version A texts, the Storia favolosa di Stefano),