Rediscovering my local library
As a kid with a passion for science and learning I was granted the greatest gift: a public library a couple hundred meters from home.
The library was one of the facilities at a 1960s brutalist concrete building in Milan, Italy. The building also housed municipality offices, a theater, a resident register office, and other services for citizens.
I was a dozen years old in the 1970s when my trips to the library began and grew into a routine driven by the interest in astronomy and space. In the pre-online era a library was nearly the only practical source of knowledge for a kid. I spent countless hours there browsing and discovering books.
As I grew up, astronomy catalyzed other interests: space exploration, physics, history of science, computing, and other areas of science.
The library was so close that most of the times I just borrowed books and read them in my own room at home, a sort of extension of the library's reading spaces. It was some of the most focused and mind wandering time I spent in my youth.
These technical interests steered my readings towards specialized literature, mostly in English, which non academic libraries didn't carry. The trips to the local library dwindled.
Althought the library closed to the public in 2000, since 2004 it has been supporting the city library system as a storage space.
In 2004 a new library opened for business a few hundred meters farther from the old one. The new facility, located at a park in one of the oldest areas of the city, is housed in the large building that once was a barn of a 17th century farm, still existing in part. A few steps from the farm is a church that dates back to the 10th century.
The new library is an inviting, ample, well lit environment with decorated walls and art. It is the hub of intense cultural and community activities such as lectures, workshops, reading group meetings, theater performances, and art exhibitions.
I didn't visit the new library until a few years ago, when retrocomputing made me rediscover print books and the library.
The first time I did was like stepping into an alternate universe that for decades I forgot existed. I slowly walked next to the well stocked shelves, browsed through books and publications, and built a mental map of what is there. It was an out of the ordinary experience, a portal to a dimension of knowledge and intellectual abundance.
Both facilities are now part of a municipal network of public libraries all across the city. My card, actually just my government ID, lets me borrow from dozens of libraries of the city. The network also offers an extensive selection of ebooks for lending.
I'm no longer a kid but I'm still granted the gift of a free source of great books a short walk from home. It's literally a stroll in the park.
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