Valerie's Report: Day Two, A Little Piece of Heaven

So, how do you spell heaven? R-E-A-L-L-Y-O-L-D-B-O-O-K-S! After leaving the beautiful Villa Diodati, Derrick and I (oh yeah, and Parrington) popped into the Martin Bodmer Library and Museum, at which point we completely geeked out. This place is amazing! Not only does it house an incredible papyrus collection, including some of the oldest copies of both Old and New Testament books, a Gnostic gospel, and two Egyptian Books of the Dead, its vast collection of first edition literature and original musical compositions (lots of Shubert, and a little Bach, Mozart, and Beethovan) is unbelievable. I’ll list off a few, just to give you a little taste:


• Late 13th century, Homer’s The Iliad

• Pre-1489, Virgil, The Aeneid

• 14th century, Ovid, Metamorphoses

• 15th century, Plato, Phaedon

• Late 9th century, Augustine, Retractions

• 1517 first edition, Martin Luther, Theses (one of only 3 copies!)

• Gutenberg Bible

• 1378, Dante’s Divine Comedy

• 1430, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

• 1516, first edition, Thomas More, Utopia

• Pre 1030, Mahayana Sutra

• 920, Buddhanama Sutra

• First folio edition, 1623, Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, Tragedies

• First edition, 1609, Shakespeare, Sonnets

• First edition, Macbeth

• First edition, Othello

• A whole bunch of other Shakespeare

• 1633, first edition, John Donne, Poems

• 1667, first edition, Paradise Lost

• First edition of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

• Not to mention a whole bunch of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Engels, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, Poe, Lewis Carroll, etc.

And as if that was not enough mental stimulation for one day, we hopped a bus back over to Old Town and explored the Musée D’art et D’histoire Geneva, which houses a massive collection of archeological finds from Egypt, Greece and Italy, as well as hundreds of paintings and sculptures dating from pre-dark ages to the present.

And, again, as if that was not enough, we explored St. Pierre’s Cathedral. Built in the 12th and 13th centuries, the massive cathedral was built on top of a Christian sanctuary dating back to 400 AD. Originally built as a Catholic cathedral, the people of Geneva voted to convert the congregation to Protestantism in 1536. In addition to beautiful stain-glass windows, wooden pews, and completely stone structure, the cathedral boasts a 6,000-pipe organ. There are only three words that can appropriately describe this place, A-Maz-Ing.

In short, this day was a little taste of a Lit major’s heaven.



Valerie