Prof. Dario Del Puppo brought his First-Year Seminar on “Food, Fitness & Self Discovery” into the Watkinson for rather non-intuitive reasons, given the title of his course, until you understand that he routinely teached Italian literature from the medieval and Renaissance periods, and then the reasons become clearer.

In any case, the students were immediately engaged and curious about the 11 items Dario chose to show them–from an edition of Dante’s Commedia  published in 1484, a 1523 edition (almost pocket-sized) of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, and the 1632 edition of Galileo’s Dialogo.

There were lots of questions, and we looked at watermarks, bookworm damage, woodcut and copperplate illustrations, initial letters, and marbled paper–and one student even discovered a fragment of a medieval manuscript as part of the binding waste . . . . these sessions are always exciting when the students are engaged!