Melody's Blog

A Catholic book lover’s heaven, Via della Conciliazione is the street that leads directly up to the piazza and then St. Peter’s Basilica. The street, though relatively short (about four blocks) is filled with bookstores, souvenir shops, religious goods shops, and gelaterias (which very annoyingly close early in November).  I am confessing that I am not a numismatic fanatic. Lorraine has numismatics that she needs to catalog and the Vatican Library has very nicely cataloged numismatics collection , so she did need to hang around for those sessions. So, I decided to ditch the long session on coins and head off to get some material for a blog post on books on the Via della Conciliazione . Lorraine and I stayed at the Hotel Columbus which is on the street at number 33, and from our side balcony we could see out to a tiny sliver of the street.  St Peter's is, of course, at the end of Via della Conciliazione and the conference was held at number 5 in the Vatican School of Library Ser

Here I am in Rome at the Vatican Library conference with my colleague from Mundelein, Lorraine. This is not working out the way we thought at all, but we are hanging in there (well, I should only speak for myself--Lorraine is doing much better and understands loads of it). The conference was held to analyze the period of the last sixty years, both in terms of the studies undertaken in the Library and its contacts with external institutions, and the life and activities of the Library and the experience it has acquired in its various departments, according to Msgr Pasini, the prefect of the Library. So far, yesterday all the presentations were in Italian except one in French and only one has shown any slides. It seems very odd to me that a scholar would discuss a collection of medieval manuscripts without slides, but it is so. (An aside, for those who are on the no powerpoint bandwagon--if you think you might have non-native speakers at your presentation, kindly use some slides.