It’s easy to get in St. Peter’s Basilica. Just wait in line (or go very early in the morning). It’s also easy to get in the Vatican Museums; just wait in line and cough up the money when you finally reach the entrance.

But it’s not easy getting into the Vatican Library. It’s not the oldest library in the world – Alexandria in Egypt has it beat by quite a bit – but it’s certainly one of the best.

The Vatican Library began in 1451, and you can collect a lot of books over 500 years. More than one and a half million, to be precise, and more than 75,000 manuscripts, or handwritten texts.

Some of the manuscripts are absolutely stunning, and ordinary visitors can now get their hands on them, thanks to a new exhibit in St. Peter’s square, “Knowing The Vatican Museum.”

I was able to leaf through a beautiful atlas and a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, both of them more than 500  years old.

The books are high-quality reproductions, and expensive in their own right, with some costing as much as $100,000.

Barbara Jatta of the Vatican Museums has done a great job putting together the exhibit, which shows not only great reproductions, but also several original pieces, drawings by Bernini and Botticelli, and an extensive collection of old coins.

It all makes you wish you had a card for the Vatican library, something normally reserved only for serious scholars.