At the end of the 1950s, with Giorgio Colli, who had been his high school teacher in the 1940s, Montinari began to prepare an Italian translation of Nietzsche's works.
After reviewing the available collection of Nietzsche's published works and the unpublished manuscripts held in Weimar, Colli and Montinari decided to begin a new critical edition.
[1] This edition, which became the scholarly standard, was published in Italian by Adelphi in Milan, in French by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, in German by Walter de Gruyter and in Dutch by Sun (translated by Michel van Nieuwstadt).
Of particular help for this project was Montinari's ability to decipher Nietzsche's nearly unreadable handwriting, which before him had been transcribed only by Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz).
Stanford University Press is in the midst of publishing "the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation" of Nietzsche's works, which will also be based on the Colli-Montinari edition.