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Latest News Latest News Vatican Library makeover to include fireproof bunker for manuscripts

Vatican Library makeover to include fireproof bunker for manuscripts

Monday 18 August 2008 By John Thavis, Catholic News Service The Vatican Library's makeover will include construction of a fireproof bunker for manuscripts and a climate-controlled room for precious papyrus fragments, the head of the library said. In addition, the library is reclaiming as a reading room the finely decorated Sistine Hall, which has been used in recent times for Vatican Museums' exhibits. Cardinal Raffaele Farina, prefect of the Vatican Library, gave a progress report on the remodeling project in an interview 15 August with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. The work, which began in 2007, is expected to be completed by 2010, when the library will reopen to scholars. The project includes the restructuring of three floors of the 16th-century library building, which houses laboratories dedicated to manuscript restoration and photo archiving. An external elevator will connect the floors. This summer employees finished the painstaking work of packaging the library's 75,000 ancient manuscripts and transferring them to protected storage areas inside the Vatican, the cardinal said. The manuscript bunker will be reconstructed with fireproof walls, flooring and pavement, and an emergency exit will be added. New technology will monitor climate and humidity, and a security system also will be installed. A connected smaller room will house the Vatican's collection of original papyrus manuscripts, with additional security and climate control. One of the most famous of these manuscripts, the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, was donated to Pope Benedict XVI last year by Frank J. Hanna III, a U.S. Catholic businessman. Handwritten in Greek around the year 200, it contains about half of each of the Gospels of Luke and John. In addition to manuscripts, the library houses about 8,300 early printed works, more than 70,000 prints, engravings and maps, more than 300,000 coins and medals, and more than 1.6 million books, Cardinal Farina said.