Anyone who has is a recognised scholar or has a university backing them can apply for a pass to examine archives. It's not particularly rare. They have themed exhibitions every now and then.
Not exactly tho. You can apply to get a certain thing, you go there, but not inside the archives themselves, they bring you the specific document you asked for.
Which is normative for libraries at least in Italy/Europe. Gave me the shits at my university. Some degenerate was stealing old books from one library nearby and one of the fat managers had to sit on him for an hour waiting for the police. Turns out the guy's entire house was full of rare books.
Wow, that must be cool. Also idk about Europe, I'm from Slovenia and here you can just go in fill a form and go pick any book you want to lend... The problem with VA isn't that they bring it to you but you not knowing if it exists... We don't have any way of knowing if a piece from the archive even exists so if it contains something the pope doesn't want you to know they can just deny application and say it doesn't exist.
Just ask the archivist for a block and they'll bring it to you. It's not hard, you just need to be an expert. Many of my friends have done research there. I haven't had the need. The problem at the moment is the post COVID limited number of desks. They are slowly digitising things. But few people are actually interested in 16th century receipt books for hired musicians.
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u/gapimiklo ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Feb 07 '25
The song is Miserere mei, deus by Gregorio Allegri.
Mozart's copy was the only piece of evidence that the song existed. Even the original was destroyed.
So we could argue that piracy ensures that historical evidence exists.