Editorial. Ubi Intuitus Interquiescat

Abstract

Ludovico Quaroni had a private library where he loved to invite his assistants. All usyoung, while waituing to meet with the professor, surely explored it, in silence, withreverence. I do not know about the others, but I have never understood the scientificsense behind its classification system. However, that extremely simple system, seeminglyalmost amateurish, still managed to aid my curiosity greatly – I recognized it – even if itseemed far removed from my very rudimentary notions of library system, based on theconcept of index by subject and classified from the general to the particular. Most of hisbooks were arranged simply according to a geographical criterion, more particularly acriterion of political geography. In other words: by nation. Greece was an exception towhich two different bookshelves were dedicated, the first for books, few, concerningmodern Greek authors and architecture, and the second, in another room, much richer intomes and large iconographic collections, marked by a nameplate that to us, from Classical studies, made our heart beat with great trepidation: written just as AncientGreece, with a normographer, even the adjective ancient capitalized. There were thenother shelves for journals, and finally, especially along the walls of the entrance corridor,were collections of volumes and small non-periodicals lined up that did not follow either theindexation by nation or historically. Entering into the apartment for the first time, therefore,anyone would have been a little surprised to be welcomed, in the entrance of the privatelibrary of a professor of architecture, by a row of books in German or by German authorson the Italian language and his dialects. It had only been a few months since nineteensixty-eight had passed, or maybe a whole year; certainly we were in that period whenQuaroni had obtained a provisional sabbatical, requested when he realized that thestudent movement of those years was not an excess of vital youthful modernity, but “... ahastening of time and ideas, which had already ascertained the undoing of all certainty,â€he told me, with no resentment or recrimination, during the very beginnning of ourconversation. Ludovico evidently wanted to begin our conversation by sharing his currentvexation, “which we must get used toâ€.