00:00Here, an immense amount of knowledge would be kept secret in the Vatican archives.
00:03With 85 km of reading and 35,000 volumes of catalogs
00:07reporting more than 1,200 years of recording,
00:09the archives would contain, according to the 2018 estimates,
00:11the equivalent of 180 Teraoctets of data.
00:13These archives mainly contain documents relating to the Pope,
00:16internal accounts of the Church and other historical archives.
00:18Until 1881, only people from the circle close to the Popes were allowed to access it.
00:23Today, their access is strictly regulated and reserved for certain researchers
00:26responding to specific criteria.
00:27Among these restrictions, the documents of a Pope can only be consulted 75 years after his death.
00:31Then, only researchers who have undergone a rigorous selection process
00:34can request access and must specify the documents they wish to consult.
00:37This process can take months and requests can be rejected.
00:40In addition, researchers do not have the possibility to freely browse the archives
00:43because they cannot physically access them.
00:45These rules make it difficult to know everything that is kept in the archives.
00:48If certain volumes are not known to the repertoire,
00:50no one can ask for them,
00:51which means that some of the information could remain inaccessible to researchers.
00:54This does not mean that the archives necessarily hide secrets,
00:57but with 35,000 volumes, it remains one of the most fascinating historical deposits in the world.
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