This paper aims to present La culture italienne dans le «Mercure de France», one of the current digital humanities projects of the Labex OBVIL (Sorbonne Université). The first step of the project, now completed, consisted in producing a TEI digital edition of every article related to Italy and its culture published between 1890 and 1918 in the Mercure de France, one of the most prestigious literary magazines in XIXth century France. OCR programs have been used to process more than 4500 scanned pages, thus creating a database which gives researchers direct access to several thousands of articles originally distributed in over 350 different volumes and therefore difficult to locate. The digital edition, now accessible online (http://obvil.sorbonne-universite.site/corpus/mdf-italie/), covers a wide range of topics, all related to Italy (literature, music, history, archaeology or politics). The second step of the project focuses specifically on literature. Indeed, between 1890 and 1918, the interest of the Mercure de France towards Italian literature appears more and more significant, with a constantly growing number of pieces dedicated to contemporary writers over the years. The column « Lettres italiennes », for instance, isn’t a mere review of recent Italian publications: through its different columnists, it allows the Mercure de France to participate to all the main cultural and literary debates of the time in Italy, to such an extent that its critical discourse had an incidence on the Italian cultural landscape of the time. The purpose of the project is to map the critical reception of Italian contemporary literature in such a vast and heterogeneous corpus. Literary value will be the key concept to the analysis of the critical discourse, through lexicometry, named-entity recognition, analysis of specificities, co-occurrences and repeated segments, in order to determine the Italian literary canon of the Mercure de France, and to highlight what, for its columnists, constitutes literary value, but also which writers and works are excluded, and why.