They were actually preserved Roman books. I winced on reading that the earliest excavators of the Villa of the Papyri, at Herculaneum, assumed that the little black cylinders they’d found were Roman briquettes, and threw a few hundred of them on a fire to keep themselves warm. As a book-lover I found it almost distressing to think how little has survived, whether through natural disintegration, periodic cultural cleansing, or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria… Even texts that managed to survive to (almost) the modern day have been lost. Greenblatt conjures up the thrill of discovering these ancient texts, and the lottery of their survival. He and his fellow humanists had already uncovered fragments of letters and treatises, but the discovery that Poggio would make in 1417 would come to have a powerful impact on the very roots of Western philosophy: the full text of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things)by Lucretius.

Poggio dreamed of finding previously unknown classical texts in these monasteries, preserved by chance through years of copying as part of the monastic discipline. It tells the story of Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian humanist who worked at the papal curia and who, during the upheavals after the Council of Constance, sought to distract himself by going book-hunting in the monasteries of Germany. The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, this book was recommended to me during our Sicily trip a year ago, in the course of a rather splendid dinner-table conversation.

The swerve book review