ABSTRACT
Stefano Lorenzetti has reconstructed a beautiful Musical Palace for us, placing the loci communes in a harmonic disposition, creating hallways and stairs to connect them in the mind.1 A mental construction such as this is absolutely fascinating because we can imagine rooms, corridors, staircases, remote corners, and gardens. After the groundbreaking studies of Anna Maria Busse Berger, scholars agree on the importance of this teaching and learning structure and have found new evidence for its application in every field of the arts and sciences across the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods.2 My aim here is not to speculate about-or maybe, taking prepositions literally, into-the philosophical construction of the Memory Palace. I would like to consider just a couple of flights of stairs, looking more closely at the stair steps, their materials, and how they are connected to each other. In other words, I am interested in discussing how our forebears might have worked with their fingers, hands, and bodies in order to build and later inhabit the Musical Palace.
