Carla Maria Monti

At least since 1338 Petrarch used to present himself in the act of reading and writing in the open air, while laying in the grass.

Three humanistic manuscripts from the family library of Duke Visconti di Modrone have been deposited at the Università Cattolica del S. Cuore, where they now are with the family’s archives. The main series of the Archives concern the family’s business and factories (19th and 20th Centuries); other series are older and include a collection of late medieval documents. The codices now given in deposit were studied by important Italian scholars in the 19th and early 20th Century. They are: MS Visconti di Modrone 1, a Petrarch manuscript, dated 1399, followed by a humanistic miscellany; MS Visconti di Modrone 2, a collection of Chancery letters from the Visconti milieu (Milan, early 15th Century); MS Visconti di Modrone 3, a nice 15th-Century copy of Gasparino Barzizza’s Epistole ad exercitationem accommodate in its original blind-stamped leather binding.