Vat Lat Adventures

I went back to the Vatican Library last week for the first time since the fall.  It really is a great place to work, but it's hard for me to schedule time to be there more than once a week.  Just getting there, getting in and getting set up is a lengthy process.  I have to admit that it is pretty awesome to be saluted by a Swiss guard as you show them your reader card at the Porta Sant'Anna; then, once you enter the massive interior courtyard formed between the papal palace on your left (you look up and see tourists on their way to visit the Raphael rooms, walking along the outdoor corridor) and the New Wing of the library, built in the 1580s by Sixtus V, on your right.  Before its construction, the courtyard stretched far and away, down to the Belvedere at the other end of the Vatican complex, but now you enter a massive box of brick and stone, the center of which is a parking lot (naturally).

There are two entrances to the New Wing; one goes to the Archivio Segreto and one to the Library.  In the library everything is state of the art.  The guard scans your card on the way in; scanning it in the cloakroom pops open your locker.  There is a gate and card scanner on the staircase, and upon entering and exiting the reading rooms your card gets scanned there too.  The gate downstairs won't let you out unless you've checked out upstairs, one way to ensure readers have returned all their materials (without, you know, pocketing anything, which used to be a serious problem!).  Once you've scanned in, you sign the register with your locker number, then choose a desk in the cavernous main reading room, or the small Manuscript room, and then indicate that number on the ledger as well.  Only after all of that can you pick up whatever printed volumes you've reserved, or put in a request for manuscripts.  Like I said, it's quite a lot of start-up just to get to the point of looking at something!

So far nothing I've been looking at has been revelatory; mostly it's just following up on published or otherwise referenced archival sources.  Last week and today I was looking at a series, Vat.Lat.14827-35, that contain Giovanni della Casa's papers.  One of the volumes contained something interesting at the back, correspondence written in numerical cipher, separate from the otherwise detailed letters going back and forth between della Casa in Venice and his patron, Cardinal Alessandro, down in Rome.  Prefacing the collection of ciphered material was the key to the cipher itself:

ab ec id of ul ng mp rt sz&

9 4 7 3 5 2 8 6 0

nulli’ 1

qua que’ qui

02 28 52

che chi non

.7 .3 .8

Scrivasi congiunto senza servar’ l’ortografia nelle aspirate’ & nelle doppie et la nulla si ponga al fine delle parole 3/o/4 volte per verso abbreviando tra la nulla li nomi consueti, exempli gratia v.s. rxma, s. sta [ri]?

I wonder how quickly you could break this code without the cipher?  I think it helps that each of the single numbers has an optional corresponding letter, multiplying the potential false answers.  The "special" sets also throw a wrench in, and allow you to do 'combos', which I wasn't expecting.  I decided to try a bit on my own!  I started with the first ciphered text and decided to try to work backward from the end. So the last line and a half of folio 615 reads:  179879896648320721832554846.72574240984697964025.743263

 I was able to break it down thusly:

1 79  879   89664

   da mia   parte

8320721

monsig

832554

monluc

846.7     257 424 098469

perche   gliene   sapera

7964 025 .7 43263

dare   qua l che conto

This is really just one a part of a longer sentence: "...for my part Monsign[ore] Monluca because he will know to give some account of it."   I had actually been working on this for a little while when I realized the folio that came next, which was written in a terribly messy haphazard hand (meaning probably della Casa himself and not his secretary), was a transcription of what I was looking at!  Which meant I could check my work and realize that I did it right, and I had--even the bit that doesn't make sense, which is Monluca: not a recognizable name to me from the Roman or Venetian milieu (and if it's so important that they're talking about it in cipher, they're probably going to be relying on only the most trusted, and therefore most well-mentioned, of go-betweens).  The 'combo' part is in the last line.  "02" gives you "qua", 5 is "l", and ".7" is che, which produces one word, qualche (some), with a kind of shortcut instead of spelling each letter out. 

This felt like a lot of fun, but of course it didn't actually produce anything useful to my work, so I had to give up on the ciphered texts.  Oh well!

ETA: Monsignor Monluca turns out to have been the French ambassador to Venice.  Mystery solved!