Lux in Arcana

In case you need an excuse to finally go on pilgrimage, or (if you don't happen to be religious) visit the Eternal City, this exhibit is your ticket. Lux in Arcana (Latin for "light on the secrets") is a spectacular showcase of 100 documents from the Vatican Secret Archives, never before shown to the public. The exhibition opened March 1st and runs through September 2012, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

Some of the items featured include Galileo's conviction, the letter instrumental to the Anglican schism begun by the affairs of Henry VIII, the document proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and the bull of Martin Luther's excommunication, among many other very cool things. If you can't make it to Rome, or simply want to whet your appetite for the real experience to come, the exhibition's well-produced website features a selection of the items, which you can browse here. You can also buy the exhibition catalog here.

I should have mentioned in the last post that the Vatican's reputation for clunkiness in web design also extends to the Vatican Museums (whose site seems to be stuck in the '90s), and to a lesser degree, the Vatican Library (which recently underwent a massive renovation a few years ago). The Vatican Secret Archives, on the other hand, has got itself a little more with the times with its very sleek website.

I dearly hope that I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit this exhibition sometime in the coming months. 

Links:

Lux in Arcana

Vatican Secret Archives

Vatican Library

Vatican Museums

Information Architecture: Vatican Edition

Homepage of The Holy See.

The Vatican gets a lot of flak for its website (it was playfully critiqued during a design review exercise in my first Web Design class last semester, and I hope it doesn't remain the only window into the Church's online presence for my peers). If you've spent any amount of time on the site, you know well the frustration of getting lost, or at the very least, finding an apostolic letter or encyclical in only Hungarian and Italian (personally, Latin-only is less of a problem, although it does take longer to read).  It contains so many documents that I'm not sure I blame their tech people for their 'bare bones' approach. I've often joked that if I ever wanted to be employed for life, I would work my way into web development for the Holy See. But like any site, visit it often enough, and you'll get the hang of navigation. That is, if you know what you're looking for. If you don't know what an encyclical or apostolic constitution is, the current layout will not be helpful at all. This saddens me, because there is enough good reading on this site to last a lifetime, and navigation shouldn't be an obstacle.