After centuries of being kept under lock and key, the Vatican has started opening its Secret Archives to outsiders in a bid to dispel the myths and mystique created by works of fiction such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.

Nick Squires - 27 May 2010

The archives, until now jealously guarded from prying eyes, provide one of the key settings in Brown’s thriller, in which Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon, played in the 2009 film by Tom Hanks, races against time to stop a secret religious order, the Illuminati, from destroying Vatican City.

In the movie, the Secret Archives are portrayed as a hi-tech cross between the Pentagon and the lair of a James Bond baddy, complete with bullet proof glass and swish steel elevators.

In reality, the archives rely on disarmingly old-fashioned technology, with a creaking metal lift connecting different floors and millions of documents catalogued in 1,300 parchment-bound inventories dating back centuries.

They have been open to carefully vetted academic researchers for more than 100 years, but in the last few months the Vatican has granted tours to select groups of journalists and members of the public, allowing a glimpse into one of its inner most sanctums.

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Nicolaas van Rijn - January 03, 2010

It’s as pretty a description of Ontario as ever was writ, inscribed on birch bark and sent more than 100 years ago to Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican.

Dated “where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers” – another way of saying “Grassy Lake, May 21,” the letter written by the Ojibway Indians in 1887 thanks the head of the Roman Catholic church, “the Grand Master of Prayer,” for providing Ojibways of the Espanola area in northern Ontario with a “custodian of prayer,” as they described the bishop sent to preach to them.

That piece of birch bark now rests deep beneath the streets of Rome, one of the hundreds of thousands of historical gems housed along the 84 kilometres of shelving that comprise the Vatican’s Secret Archives, a treasure trove of correspondence between the great and the infamous of the past 1,200 years.

And now that Ojibway letter has been plucked from the obscurity of history and comparative secrecy of the archives to join 104 other timeless treasures that helped shape and form the world we live in, published for the first time in The Vatican Secret Archives, a 252-page book lavishly illustrated with 344 colour photos and modern interpretations.

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Vatican reveals Secret Archives