The Voynich manuscript and the Jesuits of Villa Mondragone

There is an old book that nobody in the world has yet managed to read. It is called the Voynich manuscript, and its modern story passes through Monte Porzio Catone.

What is the Voynich manuscript?

It is an old illustrated book, written in a language or code that so far nobody has deciphered. Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which keeps it under the shelfmark Beinecke MS 408, says it was produced in central Europe between the end of the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, and that tests on its materials place it close to fifteenth century manuscripts. Attempts to crack it with cryptographic methods have failed, and Yale notes that the text may not be a code at all.

What does Monte Porzio Catone have to do with it?

In 1912 the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich bought a group of about thirty manuscripts from the Jesuits, and one of them was the codex that now bears his name. Yale says the purchase was made from the “Jesuit College at Frascati”. Wikipedia places it at the Collegio Mondragone, that is Villa Mondragone, which once lay within the territory of Frascati and today belongs to Monte Porzio Catone.

A Jesuit college in the villa of the popes

After the decline that followed the popes’ departure, which we cover in Villa Mondragone and the popes, the villa changed use. The sources do not agree on a single date:

• according to Wikipedia, in 1865 the Jesuits turned the villa into the Nobile Collegio Mondragone, a school for young aristocrats;
• according to Tor Vergata University, in 1896 the villa was sold to the Society of Jesus to become a famous college for the education of the Italian nobility and upper middle class.

The two dates may not contradict each other, if the villa was first used as the college’s home and then bought, but the sources we consulted do not explain it. About the end there is no doubt: the college stayed open until 1953. During the Second World War it also sheltered people who had fled their homes.

The college had its own paper, Mondragone, of which Boston College holds and has digitised several issues, including the one of 20 August 1911, a year before the codex was sold.

Who else passed through

Before the Jesuits, in 1858, the writer George Sand stayed at Mondragone and set her novel La Daniella there. And after the college, since 1981, the villa has belonged to the University of Rome Tor Vergata, which has turned it into a conference centre.

Can you see the Voynich in Monte Porzio?

No: the manuscript is at Yale’s Beinecke Library, in the United States. What Monte Porzio keeps is the place it left from, according to the sources. To visit the villa, which opens for events and special openings, see the Tor Vergata website.

In short

• What: an illustrated manuscript never deciphered, today Beinecke MS 408 at Yale.
• Who bought it: Wilfrid Voynich, antiquarian bookseller, in 1912, with other manuscripts, from the Jesuits.
• Where from: the Jesuit college, identified as Villa Mondragone (Yale says “Frascati”, where the villa once lay).
• The college: Nobile Collegio Mondragone; opened in 1865 or bought in 1896 depending on the source; closed in 1953.
• Read next: curious facts about Monte Porzio Catone.