Vatican Library digitizes the 1,600-year-old edition of Virgil

Seventy-six pages and 50 illustrations from the great Latin piece Virgil will be made available digitally by the Vatican Library. This is part of a project to digitize 80,000 manuscripts.

The work of Virgil is the oldest work (almost 1600 years old) that has been made available electronically. The edition was created around 400 CE and contains excerpts from the Latin poem “Aeneid”, about Aeneas’ journey from the destroyed Troy to Carthage, the underworld, and then Italy. There are also fragments of “Georgics” in the manuscript. Probably originally, the original edition contained all of Virgil’s canon works.

The manuscript was found in the Vatican Library in 1451 by Pope Nicholas V. The Vatican authorities are now making efforts to implement an ambitious project, digitizing 80,000 documents, to make the collection accessible to as many people as possible.