The Libro dei Sette Savi de Roma, found in the fourteenth-century Modena manuscript (below), was edited by Antonio Cappelli in 1865 and thus takes the siglum 'C' in scholarship. Because the Modena codex is damaged at the start of the Sette Savi narrative, Cappelli replaced the opening of the text with an insertion from the edition of Storia d'una Crudele Matrigna (M), as published by Della Lucia (1832).
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).