To conclude this one year-long friendship with my old book (Delle fortificazioni di Buonaiuto Lorini, nobile fiornetino), it is indeed important to highlight the positive and negative aspects that touched me during these 5 tasks.
Very positive are certainly the historical notions that I’ve learned by reading the biography of the book’s author (Buonaiuto Lorini) and by contextualizing the events of the narration in Venice at the time of the Republic (a contextualization that I had already carried out during high school, which already at that time passionated me extremely); furthermore, I’ve appreciated the notions learned at an architectural level that the book conveyed to me and the drawings were extremely suggestive. Having said that, I can conclude that analysing the work from different points of view (path of 5 tasks) resulted to be very interesting.
More specifically, the first task was very light, aimed to understand the basic information of our book, which I found very useful.
The second task, undoubtedly my favorite, as visiting the ancient books department made me feel like a real historian at work, engaged in field research. Of course, for the second task, I’ve spent much more time than what was necessary in the library, because through the meeting with the old book, I’ve felt a kind of sensation which I had never experienced in my life before that moment. It was the first time I touched such an old book and I must admit that it was a very intriguing meeting: the pages were in perfect conditions and even the maintenance of the book was very good.
The third Task, one of the most complex but, at the same time, one of the most exciting, was aimed to research in every possible language and in every possible digitized book edition, in order to get feedback on the publications appeared a long time. Fortunately, I was able to find all the necessary information.
The fourth task (text and image), was very interesting, but resulted to be really difficult to carry out for me: unfortunately, the acrobat reader (OCR) didn’t work properly and, additionally, reading the pdf pages of my book was hard. Even if this unfortunate accident occurred, I managed to find a solution that worked in an appropriate way.
Another element that I found very positive is, undoubtedly, the fact that it was a work that covered the whole year. I will certainly remember my book for a long time: for example if the exercise had lasted only 3 weeks, I would have probably forgotten about it after a short time. But, on the contrary, it was nice to spend a whole year together and understand the different peculiarities that this work offered me.
It was nice to be friends with my old book and it would be even nicer to have a chance to continue analysing other old books in the coming years.