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DAVID LASKIN
NYT Syndicate
In the madness of late spring at San Marco Square in Venice, amid the hordes pouring in from land and sea, hard by the hissing espresso machines and sizzling panini presses of overpriced cafes, I found the still point of the turning world.
I found it in the library.
It was 10 in the morning and I was standing, alone and enthralled, on the second floor balcony of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Across the Piazzetta rose the Doge's Palace. At my feet, tourist insanity. At my back, an immense, hushed, empty reading room designed by Jacopo Sansovino and decorated by Titian and Veronese.
Why go to the library in Italy when all around you there is fantastic art, exalted architecture, deep history and intense passionate people? Because, as I discovered in the course of a rushed but illuminating week dashing from Venice to Rome, Florence and Milan, the country's historic libraries contain all of those without the crowds.
Accompanied by my friend Jack Levison (a Bible scholar at Southern Methodist University who was in Italy to study ancient manuscripts), I hit six libraries in a literary Giro d'Italia. Not once were we shushed or told not to touch.
Carlo Campana, the librarian on duty in the Marciana manuscript room when we arrived, was typical in his affable erudition. Bald, voluble, with a pirate's flashing grin, Campana left his post to take me on a quick tour of the library's monumental public rooms.
"The Marciana was built here as part of the 16th-century project to create a triumphal entry to the city from the lagoon," he said, joining me on the balcony off the"salone," Sansovino's palatial reading room."Situating the library in the most important place in Venice reflects the prestige of the book in the culture of the city." Knit seamlessly into the architectural fabric surrounding San Marco, the Marciana was hailed by Palladio as the richest and most ornate building"since Antiquity" when it opened in 1570.
Originally, the Marciana's salone was filled with walnut desks to which codices (ancient bound manuscripts) were chained, but in 1904 the chamber was converted to an exhibition and lecture space. Today, you can visit the salone using the same admission ticket that gives you access to the Doge's Palace and the nearby Correr Museum, or you can ogle the room during a show, talk or concert. The reading rooms on the ground floor are reserved for scholars.
I gazed at the Titians, Veroneses and Tintorettos that adorn the salone's walls and ceiling. Yes, the library has books too ” 1 million of them ” but to my eyes the Marciana itself is as precious as its holdings.
Most of Italy's splendid old libraries got their starts as the private collections of a humanist noble or cardinal. The Marciana is typical, with its nucleus of 750 Greek and Latin manuscripts donated to the Venetian Republic in 1468 by the Greek cardinal Basilios Bessarion. With rare exceptions, these Renaissance libraries were originally restricted to elite circles of local aristocrats and scholars. Since Italy was so fragmented politically for much of its history, there was no Italian equivalent of a comprehensive state library on the order of the Library of Congress or the Biblioth'e8que Nationale de France until the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma was founded in 1876.
Luckily, Rome has no shortage of important, and stunning, libraries open to the public, and I managed to squeeze in three during my culture binge there. The Angelica, the Casanatense and the Vallicelliana are in the part of Rome I know and love best ” the historic centre anchored by Piazza Navona ” but, like the Marciana in Venice, they had all been invisible to me on previous visits. Originally associated with different religious orders (the Augustinians, the Dominicans and the Oratorians), these three libraries, now run by the state, retain some of the unique spirit of the clerics who established them.
I found the Angelica and the Casanatense libraries a fine study in contrasts. Where the Angelica is small, plush and perfectly faceted, the Casanatense is spartan and muscular. The Angelica reflects the wealth of its Augustinian founders, whose church, the Basilica di Sant'Agostino, adjoins the library, while the Casanatense shows its Dominican roots in its deep collection of books and codices on church doctrine and natural history.
The 10-minute stroll from the Angelica to the Casanatense cuts through the densest and most history-encrusted area of Rome. As I sauntered along the hallowed streets, I passed the church of San Luigi dei Francesi with its three magnificent Caravaggios depicting the life of St Matthew. Crossing the riotous fountain-cooled piazza in front of the Pantheon, I emerged onto the delightful Rococo stage set of the Piazza Sant'Ignazio and fantasised that I was a Roman and these were my neighbourhood libraries. Both are open to general readers; by some reckonings the Angelica is Europe's first public library.
My dream day would begin with a moment of reverence before Caravaggio's humbly ravishing 'Madonna di Loreto' in the Basilica di Sant'Agostino before I settled into a leather chair in the Angelica's main reading room. I'd ask the staff to fetch me Cicero's De Oratore, just so I could breathe in the scent of the first volume printed in Italy (1465), and then I'd peek into the precious early edition of Dante's Divine Comedy.
"The salone of the Angelica is a kind of vaso dei libri ” a vessel of books," the library's brisk director, Fiammetta Terlizzi, told me proudly as we surveyed the four tiers of bookshelves that line the walls of this splendid chamber."The room has the height and perspective of a cathedral." For all its loftiness, the space is tiny compared with the reading rooms of the Marciana and Vallicelliana, with room for only a couple of dozen readers, all of them seated in chairs facing in the same direction. When these lucky few look up from the page, their eyes rest on a soaring altar of books bathed in celestial light.
After lunch, I whiled away what remained of the afternoon at the Casanatense. The library's"salone monumentale" is the perfect antidote for what the writer Eleanor Clark called the"too-muchness" of Rome. Whitewashed, cavernous and presided over by a pair of enormous 18th-century globes, this elegantly spare reading room is now used for exhibits and lectures. The rest of the library is a delightful warren of more whimsically decorated chambers ” an alcove for the card catalogue, the frescoed Saletta di Cardinale (the"little hall" of Cardinal Girolamo Casanate, who founded the library in 1700 with a donation of 20,000 volumes to the adjacent Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva), an airy corner room reserved for laptop-wielding students, a hushed darker space for scholars consulting manuscripts.
Among the Casanatense's most prized holdings are an illuminated 14th-century Teatrum Sanitatis with its vivid depictions of medieval daily life, a collection of 18th-century herbals and the personal papers of composer Niccol'f2 Paganini.
After Rome, (I) headed to Florence to check out the only library designed by Michelangelo, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
"Austere" was the word that came to mind as I entered his crepuscular vestibule and ascended to the portal of the reading room on a flight of oval steps carved from a sombre gray stone known as pietra serena. No adjective I know does justice to the reading room itself. Rows of walnut benches that ingeniously double as lecterns ”"plutei," they are called ” flank the sides of a central corridor paved in intricately patterned rose and cream terra cotta. Along the two lateral walls, stained glass windows face each other in precise rectangular alignment, illuminating the benches. The heavily carved wooden ceiling seems to flatten and deepen the space to infinity, like the vanishing point in a Renaissance landscape painting.
Michelangelo's library is so rational, so resolute, so majestically realised that not in my wildest dreams could I imagine working here. In fact, as in the other great libraries I visited, the Laurenziana's reading room is now primarily a showpiece, with side rooms of a later and lesser vintage used for lectures and exhibits. Scholars from all over the world, drawn by the vast collection of manuscripts, labour in less imposing spaces tucked away in the cloister.
"There is a small club of libraries with truly deep holdings, and we are part of it," said Giovanna Rao, the director of the library, when we met in her office, a former monastic cell off the cloister."Our manuscript collection, which runs to 11,000 items, rivals that of the British Library or the National Library of France, though we are not a national library. And of course, no other library enjoys the good fortune of having Michelangelo as its architect."
Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where Jack and I reunited for the final day of our trip, comprises an art gallery, art school and ecclesiastical college, all housed in a rather severe neo-classical building very close to the Duomo. It was the intention of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who founded the Ambrosiana in 1609 and named it for the city's patron saint, that the library, museum and schools be integrated and collaborative. The architecture reflects the cardinal's aim: From the second-floor galleries, museumgoers can look down at academics working in a nobly proportioned atriumlike reading room.
With a collection of ancient manuscripts rivalling the Vatican's, the Ambrosian Library is world-class. But nonscholars like me are not deprived of its riches. The library's ornate 17th-century reading room, the Sala Federiciana, is incorporated into the museum, and, starting in 2009, it has been used to display the institution's greatest treasure: Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus, a collection of 1,119 sheets of drawings and captions on subjects ranging from botany to warfare.
Only in Italy, I reflected, and only in a library could I stand, alone and undisturbed, in the centre of a great city and peer into the mind of genius.
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02/07/2017
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