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The church of San Lorenzo in Florence was the 'home church' of the powerful Medici family. Located just across the square from their palace, the family lavished huge amounts of money on the church (though it's hard to tell from the plain stone and brick exterior), creating the Medici Chapel, an elaborately decorated space covered in marbles and semi-precious stones. Off to one side of the chapel is the New Sacristy, final resting place of some of the family's most illustrious members.

A favorite of Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo spent a good part of his youth living in the Medici family palace, and created four statues for the New Sacristy known as Night, Day, Dawn, and Dusk. The Medici Chapel and New Sacristy opened to the public as a museum more than 100 years ago, but it wasn't until the 1970's that the director of the museum discovered a trap door that had been covered by a large cabinet. Beneath the trap door was a bare, small room. The walls were covered with charcoal drawings, almost certainly made by Michelangelo.

The room has remained off limits to the public since then, but finally plans are afoot to allow limited access to the site. Don't hold your breath – the planned opening isn't until 2020 – but something to look forward to for fans of Michelangelo's work.

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“You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.”

– William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830), English writer

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The Abbey Library of St. Gallen contains more than 2000 manuscripts, making it one of the oldest and most significant manuscript libraries in the world. Half of the manuscripts were produced in the Middle Ages – around 400 of them before the year 1000.

Thanks to the Codices Electronici Sangallenses (Digital Library of St. Gallen) scholars around the world (and you) can view more than 600 of these beautiful manuscripts via high-resolution digital images.

It's no coincidence that many of the early scientific theories and discoveries were made by monks and priests. Before the invention of the printing press, books had to be copied by hand – a painstakingly laborious and expensive process. The vast majority of this work took place at monasteries. Their libraries became the repositories for knowledge, and monks and priests – often the only literate people – had relatively easy access to that knowledge. Europe's earliest universities were founded by, and often connected to monasteries, a natural outgrowth of the church as the center of knowledge.

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