During one year I was allowed to get to know the book or now also my friend “Cinque matrici da opere varie, le rovine del castello dell’acqua Giulia, della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani”, which was written by Piranesi Giobanni Battista. I was first given a different book, but when I was asked to visit the book, I realized that it was only able to visit it in Lausanne. Because of the long distance I had to change the book and meet my new friend.
I could visit my new friend in the library of the ETH Zurich. Since he is already a bit older (he was born in Rome in 1761), I should have contacted the ETH before to see him. I didn’t know this, so I had to wait 2 hours before my friend was introduced to me. It was very exciting to leaf around in such an old book about architecture. It is a pity that I did not understand it, because it was written in Italian and Latin. I was fascinated by the many detailed pictures at the end of the book.
Another task was to scan the book and translate it into English. This task was much more difficult than I thought. There were difficulties to read out the texts and often only single letters were recognized. The process of filtering the text out of the scanned book was very slow and took hours. It made me go mad. When I finally made it, I was extremely happy. Further I had to translate the text. And a big disappointment came up again, because I couldn’t decipher much of the translated text except a few words.
Therefore, I was extremely surprised when we met in the group and noticed many similarities. I had not expected this. It was very exciting and also very funny when we compared our new friends in the group. We talked in the identity of our books in a Whatsapp group chat. It was very funny. A great ending to these exercises.
What did I learn from those tasks? I have to admit that at first, I was not enthusiastic about working on these exercises because I felt they were extremely unnecessary. I didn’t know how these exercises would help me in my architecture studies. The more I was allowed to get to know my new friend, the more I realized that these tasks would also help me in my studies. I found the most interesting task when I had the book physically in my hands and could leaf through it.