MONTEFIASCONE
Keeping myself in the medieval state of mind, my travels took me to the small medieval walled city of Montefiascone, which is about 90 minutes north of Rome. The city sits on the rim of an old volcanic crater, overlooking the beautiful Lake Bolsena. Each summer people interested in the structure and history of the book meet to participate in classes held here.

EATING & DRINKING
The courses coincide with the city’s annual food and wine festival, so needless to say I took full advantage of the celebration and ate more in two weeks than I did the whole time I was studying in Buffalo.

MEDIEVAL PARADES, ETC.
Much of my time was also spent running into and away from strange medieval reenactments and countless parades. Attending the wine festival definitely helped in my enjoyment of these spectacles.

HISTORIC ALBUMS
Believe it or not, between eating and napping, I did learn a thing or two about books. The first course I attended was historic album structures, taught by Olivia Primanis.

CARTES-DE-VISITE PHOTOS
The particular structure Olivia taught us is an album that held carte-de-visite, or visiting card, portraits. The craze for these portraits was immense in the 1860s, and it was reported that in Britain half a million eggs were delivered yearly to one photo studio alone in order to make these albumen prints.

EDGE DECORATING
Since most library collections contain these types of albums, I was happy to leave the course with a model I can refer to later.

PARCHMENT REPAIR
The next course I attended was the Conservation, Repair, and Binding of Parchment Manuscripts, taught by Tony Cains, who is the retired head of conservation at Trinity College in Dublin. He can be seen here scandalizing a group of conservators by destroying a parchment manuscript in order to give us something to repair during the course.

REPAIR STEPS BY TONY
Tony taught us the finer details of repairing parchment, such as drying methods and the various ways to shape the repair parchment to fill losses.

REPAIR STEPS US
We also learned how to make various types of membranes to use to connect the repair parchment to the original artifact, and we tested these methods throughout the week.

SEMINARY LIBRARY
The summer program originally began in order to save a small, run-down seminary library. In 1988 Nicolas Barker, then Head of Special Collections at the British Library, was invited to appraise the collection. Working with the conservator Cheryl Porter, a program was established to save the collections. The summer school was started to run in parallel with the library project.

LIBRARY 2
There are many incredible examples of early Italian bindings, as well as examples of books that have survived some of the worst dangers, such as rat infestations and war, which the book punctured by bullets shows us.

WORKING IN LIBRARY
The library building now suffers from earthquake damage, so I volunteered to assist in the move to a safer location. I could finally justify all the eating, napping, and lying on the beach I was doing by carrying heavy boxes of books up and down stairs for several hours each day, to temporary shelving.

HADGRAFT CONCLUSION
My time in Montefiascone was unforgettable. I was able to attend with the help of a scholarship in honor of Nicholas Hadgraft, a British book conservator who died all too early in 2004. He was a regular instructor at Montefiascone from its beginnings, and was well loved by those who knew him. I hope all the special things I learned and experienced were a good tribute to his spirit and influence.