When I first read my books name, „De origine et amplitudine civitatis Veronae“, my reaction was twofold. On the one hand I was a bit intimidated to find that the book was written in latin. On the other hand I was happy to find that the book revolved around the north italian city of Verona.
I had been in Verona about three years ago with my high school class and I had fond memories of the beautiful, almost kitschy town.
I was surprised when I googled the books author, Torello Sarayna, and found that he didn‘t even have his own wikipedia page. To this day I have found no mention of any other book Torello has written or about anything else regarding his life.
When I looked for my books location I was a bit irritated to find that it wasn‘t available anywhere in Zürich. Apparently it was playing hard to get.
Then I learned that my book required me to travel all the way to Einsiedeln. You could call this the first little crisis in our relationship. I had more than enough to do other than going to some far-away library. But the things you do for friendships sake… Even for a friendship that was in its earliest stages.
Anyways, I went to Einsiedeln and encountered „De origine et amplitudine civitatis Veronae“ in the flesh for the first time. I was surprised that its cover showed a medieval illustration of a sick person in bed and lots of text in old german. I supposed that this shift served as a protection measure and had been added by some bookbinder. On the inside, „De origine et amplitudine civitatis Veronae“ was beautiful. I enjoyed looking at all of its illustrations. Since my latin is very limtied the books written content beyond the paragraph titles and some isolated words remained shrouded in mistery to me.
When I returned from Einsiedeln I felt that I had met someone towards whom I was rather sympathetic. But it was clear to me that our communication was hindered by a heavy language barrier.
When I look back on my year with „De origine et amplitudine civitatis Veronae“ I definitely feel like a friendship has been established between the two of us. However, the extent of ourt friendship had been limited by a variety of factors, the language barrier being only one of them. Other factors were my workload during the year and the long distance between my home and Einsiedeln. Our friendship is one of those which could grow a great deal but sadly, due to the circumstances, never reached its full potential. At least until now.