The paper provides a report of the activities and results of the Laboratorio Monaci, a course held at the University of Rome Sapienza in 2016-2017. The Laboratorio focus on Ernesto Monaci’s correspondences during the 1870’s, a key moment for Romance Philology and Paleography in Italy and abroad. During the Laboratorio, participants learned the basics of text encoding, using the international standard XML-TEI. The encoded letters are then collected and published in a platform generated by the TEI-Publisher. The paper considers the pros and cons of such a didactic setting.