Pope Leo XIV opens AQVA at the Vatican Library on his 71st birthday

Pope Leo XIV spent the morning of 14 September, his 71st birthday, at the Vatican Apostolic Library opening “AQVA. Catastrophe and Wonder,” the first chapter of a five-year exhibition cycle. The public run starts on 25 September and ends on 14 May 2027, on selected days still to be posted. Fondazione Roma and Intesa Sanpaolo are listed as partners.

The image that will travel is JR’s Diluvium: a black-and-white wave laid across the library’s sixteenth-century façade, built from Gustave Doré’s 1866 wood engraving of the Flood. Inside, American typographer Bill Moran hangs Letterfishes, marine shapes made of letters, numbers and punctuation. Italian cook Fulvio Pierangelini contributes unpublished food texts that will also appear in the library’s 2027 diary. Those three living names sit against the collections: Apicius’s De re coquinaria, Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s travel accounts, marine bestiaries, coins and cookbooks that treat water as kitchen, road and threat.

The curators are the library’s vice-prefect, Father Giacomo Cardinali, with Simona De Crescenzo, Francesca Giannetto and Delio Proverbio. The Librarian and Archivist of the Holy Roman Church, Monsignor Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, and the prefect, Father Mauro Mantovani, cut the ribbon with the Pope. Pagazzi said the Pope has spoken of fidelity to the past and to the future, and that the present of an exhibition can be a house where those two meet. Cardinali said that at a time when fear is used as a steering tool, a library should answer with learning rather than with more fear.

Leo, on his first visit to the library as pope, told staff that the Apostolic Library and the Apostolic Archives exist to develop and spread culture for the Church and for everyone else. He called the library a place of relationships and exchange, not only a room of books. He placed the new cycle in a long habit of the library taking in work that was not yet common practice, and called that habit an old and still current form of cultural openness.

The theme is not decorative. A library built above the Tiber, holding manuscripts that water can destroy, is a reasonable place to hang a wave on the wall. The cycle title, Catastrophe and Wonder, is a claim that the same element floods a city and feeds a table. Pierangelini’s texts keep the second half of that claim from becoming a slogan. Apicius keeps it old.

Practical facts for anyone who wants to walk it: the show is not daily. Friday and Saturday openings are the working plan, with hours to come. The façade piece is the part that does not need a ticket line to be seen. The manuscripts will. A five-year cycle means AQVA is a first chapter, not a closed argument. The next chapters will have to show whether “catastrophe and wonder” can carry four more subjects without becoming a brand.

Leo blew out a birthday candle in the library after the preview. That image will sit next to JR’s wave in the week’s picture desks. The more durable fact is narrower. A 71-year-old pope used his birthday to put a contemporary French photographer, an American type designer and an Italian cook inside a fifteenth-century institution and to say, in public, that the place is for exchange. The books were already there. The wave is new.