Bring me the Dante

Yesterday our class visited the Casanatense Library in Rome, one of the very first libraries to be open to the general public. It was founded by a Catholic Cardinal in 1700, and its first collection was simply the books that the bibliophile Cardinal had in his possession - some 25,000 volumes, including some really amazing texts. By far the most exciting part of this library is their special collections of ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 7th Century. Even more incredible are their Incunabulae, which is the name for books printed using a printing press in the second half of the 15th Century.

Printing came to Italy from Germany in about 1465, and it immediately took off. Italy (and especially Venice) became the center of European printing and it was the books that were produced during this amazing period that we were able to see yesterday. We compared a 12th century hand-copied manuscript written on vellum, or smoothed animal skin, to one of these early books, and the differences are surprisingly few. The people buying printed books would've wanted theirs to look as beautiful as hand-copied books had looked, with illuminated pages and ornate letters, so that's how the printers made them. Nevertheless, being in the presence of these first printed volumes was nothing short of amazing.

When it was time to look at the library's oldest printed volume (literally one of the very first books ever printed in Italy and thus one of the first ever using the printing press) the group was palpably excited. The power of these relatively small objects, viewed in the vast reading hall of this library, was enough to make us salivate. Our guide asked, in Italian, for the next book to be shown and his assistant, unsure, asked simply "Quale?" Which one? To our satisfaction he replied with the one word that was music to our ears: "Dante."

She then brought out an original print of the very first edition of the Divine Comedy to be printed on the printing press. The title page, richly illuminated and full of commentary, was breathtakingly beautiful, both in an aesthetic sense and because of the knowledge of what this object represented: the spread of wisdom and information and poetry and enlightenment from the few to the many. It's first line, written in archaic but still very readable Italian: In the name of God, this Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri...

If you ask me, the story of human history and the development of technology can be mostly explained by saying that what people really want is access to information, and they want it quickly, efficiently, conveniently, immediately. This printed edition of Dante represents a giant leap in that process. These days, we've gotten pretty good at spreading information rapidly and efficiently, and the technological advancements of the modern world will only continue to speed up this transfer. Someday, I imagine Google will have implanted something in our brains that will allow us to search all of human knowledge with merely a thought and perhaps the blink of an eye. I wonder what would happen if you hit "I'm feeling lucky..."