What a day. The long and the short of it is that the Mother Abbess of the Monastero di Corpus Domini didn’t let me see the archive, although I’m not sure all is lost. She was very beautiful and gentle, but when I asked if I could come in she just slowly shook her head, saying that there wasn’t anything in the archive that I needed, and that it wasn’t possible to consult it. I asked if that was just for now (because, I told her, although I’m leaving Ferrara tomorrow, I could come back sometime in the spring) or for forever, and she said, “Mai.” So I thanked her, said I was sorry to disturb her, and then gave her a copy of Sacred Hearts, Secret Music that I had brought along. She took it and turned it over in her hands, and just as I was about to leave she asked for my address so that she could contact me if things changed.

I knew when she turned me down that it wasn’t exactly true that there was nothing in the archive – I could, after all, give her the reference to the buste I wanted to see. But I had been led to expect such a response from a sweet PhD student that I met at the Curia on Monday – she said that the nuns have an attitude; and what she meant was not just a clausura of the body but also of the mind. Nevertheless, I think I understand why the abbess wouldn’t let me come in. She is responsible for a community that has existed, more or less enclosed, for nearly six hundred years. It is up to her to ensure that the tenor of its life is not disturbed and that its reputation is protected. She knows nothing about me, or what I might write or reveal about her convent. I can feel profound sympathy for this. If someone I didn’t know, who made stupid mistakes when she tried to speak my language and who didn’t know how properly to address me, knocked on my door and asked if she could rifle through my family’s stuff, would I let her in? No, I probably wouldn’t. I just hope that our music speaks for itself (and that she doesn’t find anything in the booklet notes to offend – she spoke excellent English!), so that she might, in the end, invite me back.

But there is also such a thing as Providence. Weird, but good and helpful, things happen to me on research trips. There was the time in 1996 that I arrived at an archive, the day before I was due to leave Italy, and found it closed, even though I had rung them only a couple of days before to make sure it was open. I returned to England without seeing the book of madrigals I needed. I went back some five years later, just because I had a morning to kill, to look at the book I’d wanted to see. And I found something incredibly important in it that I wouldn’t have been able to identify had I seen it in 1996, because at that time I didn’t have the skills. And of course if I’d been successful in getting into the archive back then, I wouldn’t have tried again in 2001. Providence. Maybe it’s just not the right time to visit Corpus Domini.

So, I mosied over to the Biblioteca Ariostea and sidled past Lodovico’s bones to have a look at a book, just for daft. And then, finding myself still with plenty of time, finally took myself off to the Pinoteca Nazionale. What wonders awaited me there! Nothing less than a sixteenth-century painting of Saint Cecilia, complete with a very legible, and I now know very viable, canon. And, of course, there is a connection with a convent – the painting was obtained from the (male) canons regular who had responsibility for one of Ferrara’s most renowned musical convents. I had to borrow a pen from one of the staff, so I could scribble the canon down on some scrap paper; while the rain has tipped down this afternoon, I’ve been playing with it in Sibelius. Its rubric is, “Qui intelligit, legat.” Well, quite. Maybe when I have a better understanding of what awaits me in Corpus Domini, I might have a better chance of getting in to read it.

So today I was a tourist, and it was market day in Ferrara. It was really foggy when I left the hotel in the morning, and the city seemed completely different. I love the idea of markets being held in exactly the same place for hundreds of years, even if the stuff on sale is different. The temptation to buy is difficult to resist, but in the end my major purchase was an outrageously expensive pair of woolly clogs that are supposed to be really good for your back. Not a moment too soon, as I’m getting to the point at which the pain of walking for more than a couple of hours is unbearable. And they really work! Money well spent.

But back to the day’s discoveries. Didn’t find out much new at the Palazzo Schifanoia, although it was as impressive as I thought it would be. Leonora Sanvitale lived there after she came to Ferrara, and delightful it must have been. There were some lovely 15th cen. antiphonals on display, and I was surprised how clear the notation was. Much easier than Solesmnes – give me an old-fashioned illuminated manuscript any time. Then on to the Palazzino of Marfisa d’Este. Now this was impressive. The whole house was kitted out with 15th and 16th century furniture, and the wall paintings were incredibly well preserved. And I was surprised/pleased to learn, via a placque on the wall on the other side of the road, that it was literally next door to the now-destroyed convent of San Bernardino, where the nuns were to be punished in the refectory if they sang polyphony without a license. (‘Scuse me, madam, can I see your polyphony license? No? Well, you know the penalty’s a week’s worth of meals off the floor. Shouldn’t have been singing then, should you, Madam?) Maybe Marfisa enjoyed Vespers there – wouldn’t surprise me.

Missed the National Gallery, though… again. Maybe I can whizz round it on Sunday morning before I go. But if I could, I’d just like to go back to Marfisa’s gaff – I’m a complete sucker for Renaissance gardens that have been left to go slightly to seed. Invariably you find yourself treading on marjoram and wild strawberries. And it had an orangery with a little loggia next to it – on the ceiling were these rockin’ putti, each with a different instrument in its chubby little hands. Hmm, wonder what happened there?

Had thought about returning to the Biblioteca Ariostea, if only because I really liked the look of all those old vellum-bound books. But I found it kinda creepy trying to study with a dead dude in the corner (Ludovico Ariosto is buried IN THE LIBRARY! On the second floor!!), although come to think of it, it’s not completely different to being in the old BL Manuscript Room. So instead, I’ve been resting for most of the afternoon, as I’ve hardly got any sleep for the last two nights. On that subject, the bed is now sprayed, and I have been given full instructions on how to avoid Ferrara’s special little micro-mozzies that like to bite you all over. Phew. Not bedbugs after all. My back will need the rest, too, as I’m sure I’ll be leaving Ferrara with loads of books that I didn’t come with. Saint Augustine said, “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” Those who do not travel don’t have to, they don’t have to shut their eyes and ears to temptation. I’ve been trying to resist, but the siren lure of the stores with cool tomes on Ferrarese dialect, or the convents that were active in the city up to the eighteenth century, is drawing me in inexorably. No, no, let me go! But like the Ferrarese fog, they just wrap themselves around you.

This kind of needed an entry on its own. What would I do without it? I can chat to my loved ones, check my email and my buddies’ statuses on Facebook , note that it’s going to pour with rain tomorrow (and I don’t have any suitable shoes), find train times, and refer almost constantly to my pocket Italian/English dictionary. But the best thing, the Very Best Thing, is that it takes pictures. Nice ones of lovely urban wildlife like this cathedral gecko, but so much better – so, so, so much better – is that it takes pictures like this, and this:

Nobody minds. The librarians and archivists say, “Have you got a camera?” and I say, “No, but I have my phone.” They are slightly incredulous and give you that Italian look that means, “crazy foreigner.” But then I snap away! I can enlarge the teeny-tiny writing so I’ve got a marginally better chance of making out the abbreviations. I can print out the partbook and transcribe at my leisure. Useless publication but interesting dedication? Don’t transcribe it in the library! One snap and it’s on file. First the laptop and now this….

Technology could go one better, of course. It could come up with an interface between the word processor, the graphics programme and the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (aka Capelli) that just reads the document for you and sends it directly to your book manuscript. Come on Mr Jobs, you know you want to.

Another day, another bug. No, really – I seem to have attracted something that is eating me alive in my hotel bed; not just mosquitoes. I hope not bedbugs, but I have a terrible feeling that they are. My face looks like I have chickenpox because I even have bites on my eyelids. Lord knows what all these nice archivisti and religiosi must think of me. But such is the lot of the intrepid musicologist, braving even the fiercest of insects to bring our musical heritage to life. So, I stay on, even though when I get home I will have to freeze for four days everything that can’t go through the washer and dryer. Pass me the DDT and the cortisone, honey – but maybe I ought to ask for a different room….

I still have to hang out in Ferrara for a few more days, as the abbess at Corpus Domini isn’t taking visitors until Saturday. It took all my courage to ring on the doorbell of the convent. Lord only knows why, what are they going to do to me? They’re nuns, for crying out loud. But I hate intercoms even when I can speak in English, so they are immeasurably more painful when I have to speak in Italian. And it was only slightly better when they let me in: I still had to peer through a little hatchway and speak to this tiny lady who I could barely see, and who told me politely and all smiles, but very firmly, that there was no way I was coming in until the abbess said I could. At least she couldn’t see me very well, either, or she’d have assumed I was going to bring plague into the convent and sent me packing without even the promise of Saturday.

Yesterday afternoon, before the full horror of my affliction was apparent to me (the bites can take hours or days to appear, so it wasn’t until the evening that I could count over fifty red lumps of varying sizes) I did my usual trawling round the city, nosing around the many museums that once were houses for my ladies, both courtly and conventual. I loved the Casa di Romei, which was bequeathed to the nuns of Corpus Domini and was incorporated into the convent in the sixteenth century. And, lo, there was a mini-exhibition of pottery and tableware that had been excavated at S Antonio in Polesine. Fantastic – the nuns were so organized that their bowls had indications on them to show where they were to be used: CA for cantina, R for refettorio, and my favourite, the little bowl used in the dispensary. I so wanted to take a photo, but couldn’t.

However, I did take a photo of this lovely lady who sells stuff made by monks and nuns at her shop, La Badessa. She said if Celestial Sirens ever came to perform in Ferrara she’d do loads of publicity. I wanted to buy everything in the shop, from liqueur to smelling salts and shampoo via the curious looking tisanes made by the Camaldolese. Eventually I bought some Benedictine unguentum salutis for my fellow nun-aholics. I probably ought to go back today and get something blessed for my bites.

what it was to be a musicologist in the good old days. I mean a time when there were no computers, no internet, no scanners. I can vaguely remember my student days, when microfilms were as good as it got, and you had to use those peculiar photo-developer printers, dodging all the while the noxious, immediately stain-inducing substance that made your fingers stink, and then quickly transcribe the music before the printout faded. But in the end, it was actually cheaper to travel to Italy and stay in youth hostels, transcribing (in pencil) madly for as long as the library was open, than it was to get all the films together (although there was never any realistic prospect of going to Gdansk, if that’s where the book you needed was). That first trip I must have carted shedloads of manuscript paper over, ruling it up in the evenings before my next library visit (“Sono studentessa inglese. Sono qui a Verona/Parma/Bologna/Cremona per fare richerche… sto preparando mia tesi dottorale…” always ten times harder when you had to get into the library by intercom). And when I got home, there was the eighteen-month anxious wait for the Gdansk films, all the while wondering if the books I sent in lieu of payment – this was barely post-glasnost after all – ever made it through Polish customs.

Yesterday I went to the library in Southampton with my little box of films, and lo, what wonders I beheld. For now the microform reader scans into the computer attached to it, and you can save everything onto your memory stick. Take the scans home, print them out, and transcribe them into your WYSIWYG music notation software. This morning I logged onto OPACs all over Italy and found at least six reprints of a book that I thought had only been published in 1589. I don’t suppose I would have thought this possible twenty years ago.

But – and I find this somehow reassuring – I will still be thrown back into that uncertain, weird world of the European archive as I’m planning a trip in October to rustle around monastic/conventual records. I’m sure the Biblioteca del Monastero di Corpus Domini is about as far from the interweb as it is possible to be. And despite my swagger, I still feel deeply trepidacious about what I might find, and whether I will be able to cope with it. It’s a bit like being pregnant for the first (or actually, any) time. You know that something will happen, has to happen, you’re just not quite sure what….

In an attempt to make both my research leave and my website more productive, I’m trying out this Wordpress plug-in that allows my blog to feed to Facebook. I know the blog will help me write, and Pete’s always after me to get stuck in with the website. And maybe, just maybe, it will help with discipline.

I have this other plan, too, to try and adapt the exercises from Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft to my academic writing. Maybe this will be the place to put them, too. Just because it’s academic writing doesn’t mean it can’t be compelling narrative, eloquent and vibrant.

Well, we all have heroes and we all can dream.

Now to see if it works.