Chapter Library of Verona

The guide to the Chapter Library of Verona centers on thirteen forty-five, when the poet Petrarch arrived as a guest and began pulling volumes off these shelves, hunting for anything by Cicero, the Roman orator his generation revered as marble-cool and endlessly wise. It follows what he found instead, a bundle of private letters nobody had bothered with, and the plain fact that he had no way to take them home. The library holds a second, older secret too, a legal handbook scraped clean by a monk centuries ago so the parchment could be reused for prayers. Look closely at the spines around you before you decide any of them are ordinary.