Friday, February 22, 2013




Library Heaven

To get inside the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, you first have to request a library card. Which means speaking with a certain Signor d’Onofrio, white-haired and voluble, who’ll make you fill out a form while he peppers you with questions and comments.
          What’re you looking for, he’ll ask.
          A book of poems, Antonio and I answer him.
          Ah!, he replies, I write poetry too. You need a password, what’ll it be?
          Zora, I say. My cat’s name—it’s one of Calvino’s cities in Invisible Cities.
         Ah!, he responds. So you like cats. And Calvino. Wait, I’ll show you around…
First, go put your things away. Just push past those people entering; I’ll signal to the front desk.
         Laminated cards in hand, we proceed to the entrance gate, where, after being scolded by Signor d’Onofrio, a very brusque woman allows us upstairs to stash our belongings in a locker. Signor d’Onofrio awaits us on the other side of the balky card-swipe machine, which won’t give us the green light. Never mind that thing, just come with me, he orders us. Let’s go to the courtyard first. I’m not supposed to take people there but…shhh…


        Forefinger to lips, he sweeps imperiously past the book-order desk, the two of us trotting on tiptoes behind him. He leads us to a corridor, a set of stairs, a closed door, another closed door. He opens it—and there before us is the beautiful interior cloister of the library, Il Chiostro del Rossellino, a place of utter tranquility smack in the middle of Florence.

       Bello, eh? he said. People don’t even know it’s here. Come, now I’ll show you our card-catalogue room. This library was built in the mid-Thirties, though the actual designs were drawn up early in the twentieth century. Amazingly modern—you won’t believe the furniture in that room. There’s more stuff in the basement, too… We don’t have the staff or money to take care of it, so we’ve had to put it in storage. Terribile, what’s happened to our library!

        He’s right about the furnishings in the card-catalogue room. The work-desks and lighting fixtures are Bauhaus incarnate: simple, elegant, seemingly weightless. But as we leave and follow Signor d’Onofrio around, what really stops the two of us in our tracks are the various works of art scattered throughout the library’s main floor. We come across painted ceramic sculptures by della Robbia, a couple of marvelous anonymous portraits of Petrarch, a wonderful terra-cotta David. Wow, we keep exclaiming. Sí, Signor d’Onofrio keeps concurring. You must come back! So much to look at!


       Of course we aren’t able to see the printed-matter gems of the library’s collection—four thousand incunabula, twenty-five thousand rare manuscripts, and who knows how many rare books would take months of visiting time. But we’re amazed by what’s openly visible: great art you simply stroll past en route to the bathrooms. The library seems woefully under-utilized. I find myself entertaining a fantasy in which I invite everyone I can think of to enter, then barricade the doors and serve them all champagne and let them walk through the collection, led by Signor d’Onofrio, who’d reveal countless thrilling bibliographic secrets. We’d all stay for weeks, living on nothing but bubbly and books, too excited and happy to leave…

        Signor d’Onofrio leads us back to his office, where he declaims a poem he wrote (so he says, proudly) on the occasion of his cat’s release from the veterinarian’s office, where she apparently spent several very un-fun days. We thank him profusely for his recitation and for the tour, accept a signed copy of the poem, wait a bit for the reference librarian to produce the volume of poems we’ve come for, get a few pages photocopied at a nearby desk, and are on our way.
        At lunch around the corner (tourist note: a little trattoria called Benvenuto on via dei Tintori, cheap and good), Antonio and I agree that no national library could possibly be more winning than this one. And that Signor d’Onofrio is likely to email us more poems—which he does: they await us when we return home.

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