The Archimedes Device
Featured in our novel. The NYT writer uses the Italian name: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
Two really nice photos and this description....
"Though summer was still a month away, Florence’s centro storico was already dense with tourists. But the cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo, which houses the Laurenziana, though just a stone’s throw from the Duomo, was so deserted when I arrived at 11 a.m. that I wondered if I had come to the right place. I bought my ticket, followed the signs and pushed open the door, and for the next hour I had Michelangelo pretty much to myself.
“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 somber 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 realized 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, labor 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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/tr...
Two really nice photos and this description....
"Though summer was still a month away, Florence’s centro storico was already dense with tourists. But the cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo, which houses the Laurenziana, though just a stone’s throw from the Duomo, was so deserted when I arrived at 11 a.m. that I wondered if I had come to the right place. I bought my ticket, followed the signs and pushed open the door, and for the next hour I had Michelangelo pretty much to myself.
“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 somber 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 realized 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, labor 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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/tr...
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by
David
(new)
Jun 13, 2017 04:00PM
WOW!! This library just clamored aboard my bucket list!
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I got really lucky, David. The library was already in our novel storyline when my wife and I booked a research visit to Italy. Before we left, I still recall standing in a B&N bookstore glancing through a Fodor's guide about Florence. For the Laurentian Library entry it said something like: "the library recently re-opened after being closed for 10 years for 'minor repairs." This was six months before we were due to sail. Phew!We were able to get a personal tour from Dottoressa Sabina Magrini, a dark-haired Italian beauty who spoke English with an Oxford accent and was director the library at the time. We already had an important character in the book named Elena, who was director of the library, and Sabrina was basically that character come to life.
Sabrina's guidance was vital because it was only because of it that we were able to see the hidden tiles underneath the wooden floor in the reading room of the Laurentian as pictured in the NYT article. These tiles also figured in our story line.
Our other big travel destination was Syracuse (Siracusa) Sicily, the birthplace of Archimedes, where our modern characters follow a series of historical clues through the ancient Neopolis. Everything comes together there in the denouement with the Pythagorean society, the inspector from the art theft squad, the villainous antiquities dealer and our four main heroes.
Sometimes luck is waiting for us before we know where we are going.
Some don't want to accept this, but luck is part of life
