Triumph of Worms

Marco Vatasso, a young lawyer from Turin, presented his student pass at the Vatican Library last week and waited quietly while a felt-slippered attendant brought him his books. On his way down to the reading room in the Sixtus V wing, he passed a workman and one of the architects engaged in the restoration of the Library arguing excitedly in front of a pillar. Marco Vatasso worked late. It was almost dusk, almost everyone else had left the building, when he looked up to see the Library's whole massive-beamed roof crashing down on his head. The avalanche of masonry, bursting through the vaulted ceiling of the great Salone Sistino above, smashed into the gaily painted reference room on the ground floor. The walls, six feet of solid brickwork, stood firm.

Nearly 350 years ago, His Holiness Pope Sixtus V decided to make more room for the growing library of the Vatican and ordered the architect Domenico Fontana to build a new wing bisecting the great court of the Belvedere. For a long time this housed almost the entire library, but in later years most of it was moved to adjoining buildings. The main hall of the Sixtus wing was reserved for special exhibitions under glass cases. Pius XI once served as Librarian of the Vatican, and the Library is one of his special prides. About five years ago he realized that the entire plant needed modernizing, and turned to the U. S.

At the expense of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, William Warner Bishop, Librarian of the University of Michigan, was sent to Rome to make a preliminary survey. Vatican librarians were sent to the Library of Congress and other U. S. institutions for experience. In 1928 a corps of U. S. and other foreign librarians went to work recataloging the entire Vatican library of approximately 50,000 manuscripts and 350,000 printed books. The Library of Congress donated a complete set of reference cards. In 1930 the catalog was completed.

Almost as soon as the work on the catalog started it was realized that the galleries containing the books were obsolete, some of them frankly dangerous. Again the U. S. was called upon. Angus Snead MacDonald, Protestant head of the library equipment firm of Snead & Co. (Jersey City), went to Rome to oversee the installation of a great range of steel bookstacks in what had once been the Vatican mosaic factory. Accommodation for 700,000 volumes was provided. At the same time engineers got busy removing the ancient, wormy oak beams from the roofs of the buildings around Belvedere Court, replacing them with modern steel trusses. They were waiting till spring and the end of Rome's rainy season to begin work on the Sixtus V wing which crashed last week. Said Bookstacker MacDonald:

"The Pope, as one of the most progressive men in Europe, has been carrying forward a campaign of modernization in which the library work was incidental, but in this case the worms beat him to it."

Unfortunate Lawyer Vatasso was still alive when, after six hours, Roman police and firemen dragged him from the ruins. He died on his way to the hospital. The bodies of three workmen were found. Pope Pius was up at 6 o'clock next morning, praying for their souls.

As the days passed and squads of workmen ferreted in the debris, it became apparent that the artistic loss of the disaster was not so great as had been feared. Only ten days prior, an immensely valuable lot of manuscripts had been moved from the worm-eaten wing to a place on Mr. MacDonald's new steel shelves. About 15,000 books on the early church history of England and Germany were lost; so were a number of ornamental vases and the baptismal font of Napoleon III's son, the Prince Imperial. Five days after the tragedy, rain threatened. Scaffolding was raised, tarpaulins stretched. An army of volunteers worked all night in the hard beams of searchlights to save precious books and manuscripts. They beat the rain.

Interesting fact: the steel trusses which modern engineers are inserting in place of the worm-eaten oak beams of the Vatican Library roof are by no means a permanent repair. Steel rusts quicker than worms eat oak. The wooden beams had lasted nearly 350 years. Steel beams, unless they can be protected by constant painting, will not last 150.*

*As every contractor knows, cast and wrought iron are many times as rust-resisting as steel, hut they have not the tensile strength necessary for building members.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.