«Friends with an old book» at first that sounded very strange to me. Why would I want to be friends with a book called; «Le Vite de’ piú celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo precedute da vn saggio sopra l’architettura». I did not even understand the title.
After the first exercise I was still not sure if I can be friends with the book nor with the tasks.
However, now looking back at the task where we had to go to the library and feel our book and look through it for 20 minutes I must say it got more interesting. First of all that you would need to reserve a time to see a book and then to hear from other people that they could only touch it with gloves was something new.
Although I did all the tasks i am not sure if I would consider us friends already. I think we just got to know eachother a little and I understand Milizias book a bit more.
Due to the rather poor results of the OCR reader the translated passages ended up being a weird mix of english and italian words and there is hardly a way to get a good overview on the content and the main points of the book. You would need much more time for that. However, I think the title sounds very promising and it would be interesting to be able to read more about these most famous architects of all nations and times. It would be nice to have a summary somehow eventhough I guess that is not easy to find and would take up way too much time to do for every student. It might also not be the point of the exercise to have one and rather to be able to figure out as much as possible by yourself ?!
Therefore I thought the last exercise was the most fun. Talking about the book with others showed me all the differences and similarities within the books and you actually started to understand what makes your book special.
In conclusion I would say that it was an interesting experience that you could get in contact with such an ancient book which you usually only hear about in lectures. It makes it easier to imagine what Vitruvius and Co. did and how their books have looked like. Its was also interesting to see that you are now able to make connections to the lectures by recognizig the several names in Riccardo Millizias book.