The Laurentian Library is part of the San Lorennzo complex, a massive church and monastery heavily patronized by the Medici family. The Library itself is worth visiting, if only to see the lobby, designed by Michelangelo in a whack-tastic manner which I’m calling “pre-modern post-modern.” The Library’s main room is also interesting, with cramped wooden benches onto which the books were chained, leading me to picture all Renaissance scholars as kleptomaniac dwarfs.
The Library also has special exhibitions featuring manuscripts and books from their collections. Their research is impressive and the published catalogs are good reading, but visiting the actual exhibition can be frustrating: lots of books in Latin where the sign says something like “this page describes diseases of the face” but without offering any translation.
