At the Capitoline Museums in Rome, from the 29th of February to the 9th of September 2012 is open the exposition which has been announced as the media and cultural event of the year: Lux in Arcana.
On the occasion of the 400 years anniversary from the Vatican Secret Archive foundation, for the first time in history, in the exposition Lux in Arcana, 200 different types of documents, which so far have been treasured in the Vatican Archive, will be opened to the public.
The Archive is a box which contains more than one thousand years of history and more than 85 km of shelves; for 400 years it has been at disposal of the Holy See which has fostered its documents and saved them first of all for the Pope and itself and then also for the experts from all around the world. The documents heritage contained in it covers a period of twelve centuries (VIII-XX cent.) and since 1881, year in which Pope Leon XIII opened it to the experts, is universally recognized as one of the main research centers in the world.
The Archivium Secretum Vaticanum has a double function: on the one hand the Vatican is constantly busy with the preservation of the documents heritage contained in it, on the other hand it provides the research instruments necessary for the experts to study the documents.
Lux in Arcana is the exhibition which for the first time reveals more than 200 accounting and legal documents, diploma and edicts, bulls and letters, papal registers, codes, code books and formularies, that covers twelve centuries of history and therefore are a sample of all the kind of documents in the Archive, written on paper, silk, cortex, papyrus from Europe, Asia, Africa, America.
The main aim of the exposition is to explain and report, through the documents themselves, what the Vatican Secret Archive is and how it works, and in the contemplation of this unique event, in the exposition there have been included some multimedia resources – videos on flat screens, dynamic graphics, slide shows- which can help the visitors to understand and individuate the historical context of each document, and to get some extra information about the historical characters involved in Lux in Arcana.
In addiction a free Official App of the exposition has been created, and it will be downloadable from every Apple or Android smartphone and from the tablets too; the App will allow visitors to read extra contents about the documents and to see images, technical data and explicative captions. The strong influence of technology on Lux Arcana and on the multimedia instruments at visitor’s disposal, shows also in the Facebook Page of Lux in Arcana, where news about the exposition and real time updates are published periodically and in You Tube, where there is an interesting video about the exposition.
Lux in Arcana begins in the beautiful Oriazi and Curiazi room, in which there has been set up the section “The Memory Guardian”: an introduction to the exposition and to the different kind of materials it contains and even some documents; here there are for example Alessandro VI Inter cetera bull about the discovery of America, the legal acts of Galileo trial, Carlo V Worms edict and then some documents containing the correspondence between famous characters: the letter on silk of from the empress Elena from China to Innocenzo X; the letter from the English Parliament members to Clemente VII about Enrick VIII marriage cause or the one from Abraham Lincoln to Pio IX.
Serena R.
Prima Posizione Srl- Web Marketing Agency
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Lux in Arcana Vatican
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