VIII.ix. I Glossatori

"I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom."
- Edith Wharton

My mother had left now and I was once again on my own in my habitual world of Bachelorship, with an elongated dishwashing schedule and a perpetually unmade bed. Owing to my various visitors and my exams, I had been rather incommunicado with my circle of friends here, holed up in libraries or museums for long hours while the weather turned to spring, unnoticed by me and the parkless city alike.
    I had been working rather vaguely since my arrival on a study of the tombs of medieval jurist tombs in Bologna. This project had grown immensely larger than I had originally intended, becoming a sort of synthesis of all the scholarly thoughts I had assembled during my time in Bologna. Lately, I had been spending an inordinate of time working in a variety of libraries, the resources of the dear little art history department here having long been exhausted.
    In Bologna, libraries are still seen as the reserves for a select view, treasure houses of some kind of occult knowledge. The procedure for actually consulting books is just as Cabbalistic. No two libraries share the same cataloguing system, so each needs to be memorized as much as possible, at least when the shelves are open to the public; generally, they are not.
    Usually, a fair number of libraries indicates a healthy university. At Bologna, there are ninety-three in total. Many subject areas overlap, since some libraries are full and need to have their newer acquisitions sent elsewhere. The average library here is eight times smaller than the median at my home university, which makes for frustrating study hours, most of which are occupied by transit through the perilously distracting streets of the university district.
    At the Italian Studies library, books need to be ordered from the stacks on small slips of green paper. Author, title, date, physical description, each of these need to be provided in order for your book to be found. Then, once an hour, there is a retrieval run, and a worker is dispatched to fetch your book. Once it has arrived for your consultation, you must sign a form and surrender a piece of identification until you are done. Permission to borrow a book is simply beyond question. How anyone succeeds in reading an entire book this way, while staying at one of the cramped, crowded library desks for hours at a time, is beyond me, but apparently no one else.
    At the Archiginassio, the venerable ancient seat of the University, now a major library, the process is equally counter-intuitive. Here, the user is not allowed to enter the library with books from the outside world, except if he manages to get a hold of a precious outside book pass, only a few of which are issued each day.
    The Sala Borsa, that beautifully renovated public library just steps away from Piazza Maggiore, is still a choice place to study, of course, but it too is beginning to look somewhat run down, victim of the uniquely Italian plague of public vandalism. Often, in this country, a new public building remains beautiful, gleaming in typical Italian style, for only a few months before it is defaced and dirtied by ungrateful crowds. The same is true of train cars inside and out, which often become defaced with graffiti in a supposed act of rebellion, simply stupid considering that railways are among the more progressive forms of travel. So, slowly, the Sala Borsa is becoming slightly unpolished, not with spray paint, but with the gradual neglect that is both this nation's scourge and its charm.


A student in the fourteenth century


One of the exterior Glossatori monuments, from about 1268