Rome exhibit explores European culture through ancient manuscripts

PanARMENIAN.Net - As Europe struggles with an identity crisis, a new exhibition in Rome looks at the birth of European culture through ancient manuscripts and the earliest printed books, including a first edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, AFP reports.

While mass migrant arrivals have fuelled xenophobia and threatened to undermine the EU's core values, the exhibition extols the melting pot of cultures which shaped Europe -- beginning with the 13th century Italian poet, himself a political exile and migrant.

"The exhibition was designed to show that Europe means plurality of cultures because, with the Mediterranean Sea, it was at the junction of three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe)," curator Roberto Antonelli told AFP.

"It is no coincidence that so many cultures and languages crossed here," he said at a presentation to the press ahead of the show's opening on Thursday.

Nearly 190 works are displayed in the library of the prestigious Lincean Academy in Rome's Trastevere district, a science academy founded in 1603 and named after the lynx, an animal with the sharp vision science demands.

Books, manuscripts, codices and encyclopedias in Latin, Greek, Chaldean, Arabic and Hebrew, borrowed from Roman and Vatican libraries, are on display in over 40 display cases -- eight of which are bulletproof.

They show "that it is culture which unites us as Europeans. That is the strong message which emerges from the exhibition, even more than its great scientific value," said Rosanna Rummo, head of Italy's state libraries.