IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 286

Of all the institutions of Renaissance Italy, none is more closely associated with a single family than the bank that carried the Medici name. It never employed more than a few dozen staff, and it operated from a handful of offices scattered between London and Naples. Yet for much of the fifteenth century it was the most powerful financial house in Europe, handling the pope's money and lending to kings.

The founder was Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, born in Florence in 1360. His father died while he was a boy and left him little, and like many younger sons of modest Florentine families he was sent into commerce. He learned the trade in Rome, in the bank of a distant relative, Vieri di Cambio de' Medici, and rose to become a partner in it. In 1397 he established a bank of his own in Florence, together with a small office in Rome, and from that base the family's fortune grew for the next sixty years.

Florence was an obvious headquarters. Its gold coin, the florin, first struck in 1252, contained about three and a half grams of fine gold and was accepted from London to Bruges as a reliable measure of value. Its government borrowed heavily to pay for war, and its merchants traded across Europe. A Florentine bank could therefore draw on a dense network of correspondents, and its partners could travel with letters of credit that were honoured abroad.

Giovanni's most important contribution was organisational. He did not treat his offices as departments of a single firm. Each branch was constituted as a separate partnership, with its own capital, its own books and its own partners. The Florentine partnership, known as the maggiore, usually held the largest share, but the manager of a branch held a stake of his own and took a corresponding share of the profits. Because a branch was legally distinct from the rest, its losses did not automatically fall on the parent partnership.

Money itself was rarely moved. Payment was made by bill of exchange: a written order by which a merchant in one city instructed an agent in another to pay a sum to a named person. Because the sums were expressed in one currency and repaid in another, at a rate agreed in advance, the transaction looked like a currency exchange rather than a loan. The difference between the two rates produced a return for the banker. This mattered because the Church condemned the taking of interest, and a bank that openly charged it risked both its reputation and its soul.

To keep track of all this, the Medici kept unusually careful accounts. Their ledgers recorded each transaction twice, once as a debit and once as a credit, so that errors could be found and the position of every account checked. Branches sent regular reports to Florence, where the partners reviewed them. The surviving records show a business obsessive about detail, listing everything from the wages of a clerk to the cost of a horse.

The Rome office was the engine of the whole enterprise. The papal court collected money from every part of Latin Christendom and spent it on building, war and administration, and it needed agents who could transfer funds across borders and make payments on its behalf. Giovanni became banker to the curia, and for decades his successors handled the pope's accounts. The profits from this connection were enormous. They also made the bank vulnerable, because its fortunes were now bound to those of a single institution.

Giovanni died in 1429, and control passed to his son Cosimo, who had in practice been running the business for some years. Cosimo was the most successful banker of his age and also the most political. In 1433 his rivals in Florence had him arrested and exiled, but within a year a change of government recalled him, and he spent the rest of his life as the city's unofficial ruler. His money bought influence in France and England as well as in Italy, and he used it to build churches, collect manuscripts and support artists. He died in 1464.

Under Cosimo's son Piero, who died in 1469 after only five years in charge, and then under his grandson Lorenzo, the discipline of the firm weakened. Lorenzo was a patron and a politician, and he gave the business far less attention than his grandfather had done. Branch managers, sharing in profits they no longer had to justify in person, began to take risks their employers knew nothing about. The most expensive was taken in Bruges, where the manager, Tommaso Portinari, lent heavily to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. When Charles was killed in battle in 1477, the loans became almost worthless.

The end came slowly. Branches were closed or sold, and the bank contracted until it was little more than the Roman office and the Florentine parent. In 1494, when a French invasion drove the Medici from Florence and a new government seized their property, the bank was finally wound up. Its papers, however, survived, and the account books kept for legal reasons have allowed historians to reconstruct the business in unusual detail.

The phrase 'public library' is more complicated than it appears. Does public mean that the building is owned by the state, that it is paid for out of taxes, that anyone may walk in, or simply that it is not the private property of a single family? Does a library have to lend its books, or is it enough that people may read them on the premises? Historians who argue about which library came first are often, without saying so, arguing about definitions.

The ancient world had collections of writing long before it had anything resembling a public library. The clay tablets gathered for the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BC were a royal archive, assembled for the king's use and that of his scholars, and there is no evidence that ordinary inhabitants of the city ever saw them. In Rome, by contrast, libraries were built as public buildings. The first was established by Gaius Asinius Pollio in the 30s BC, and Augustus soon followed with another in a temple on the Palatine hill. Trajan's Ulpian library, founded in the early second century AD, became a model for others across the empire.

These Roman libraries were open to any citizen who could read, and they were paid for out of the private wealth of generals and emperors. They were not lending libraries: readers consulted scrolls on the premises. Greek works were usually housed separately from Latin ones, sometimes in different rooms or wings of the same building, and the two collections were catalogued by title and author. Staff fetched and replaced the scrolls, which were kept in numbered cupboards around the walls.

After the empire ended, the tradition of the open library faded. Books were copied by hand in monasteries and cathedrals, and collections were small and precious. Access was granted to monks, clergy and occasionally to visiting scholars, but the idea that a library existed for the general reader had little place in medieval Europe. The universities that appeared from the twelfth century onwards built libraries for their members, again closed to outsiders.

The first library that can reasonably be called public in the modern sense was built in the small Italian town of Cesena. Malatesta Novello, the local ruler, paid for a purpose-built hall to house a collection of manuscripts, and when it was completed in 1452 he handed the building and the books over to the town rather than keeping them as a private treasure. The library, known as the Malatestiana, is still in use, in the room built for it, and it has been in continuous occupation for more than five centuries.

In Britain the decisive step was taken at Oxford. When Sir Thomas Bodley refounded the university library in 1602, he insisted that it should serve scholars from beyond the university as well as its own members, and he spent the rest of his life raising money for it. A generation later, in 1653, a library was founded in Manchester under the will of a wealthy cloth merchant, Humphrey Chetham. It charged no membership fee and was open to anyone who could read, and it is usually described as the oldest free public library in the English-speaking world.

During the eighteenth century, reading spread through commercial channels rather than public ones. Subscription libraries, owned by their members, circulated books among those who could afford the annual payment; circulating libraries, run by booksellers, lent novels for a small fee; and mechanics' institutes, founded from the 1820s, gave working men access to technical books. All of these widened readership. None of them was free, and none was provided by the state.

The breakthrough came in 1850 with an Act promoted by William Ewart, a Member of Parliament who had campaigned for the idea for years. It allowed the councils of boroughs with more than 10,000 inhabitants to levy a small rate — at first no more than a halfpenny in the pound — to build and maintain a library. It applied to England and Wales only, and it did not oblige any town to act. Adoption therefore depended on local enthusiasm, and in many places the proposal was defeated by ratepayers who saw no reason to pay for other people's reading. Manchester moved fastest and opened its free library in 1852.

Across the Atlantic the pattern was different. Peterborough, a small town in New Hampshire, established a library supported by local taxation in 1833, and Boston opened a large municipal library in 1854. From the 1880s the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie transformed the picture, paying for the construction of more than 2,500 library buildings in the United States, Britain, Canada and elsewhere. He gave the buildings, but only where a local authority agreed to provide the site and pay for the books and staff.

One further change altered the experience of using a library. Early public libraries kept their books behind a counter, and readers chose from a catalogue and waited for an attendant. From the late nineteenth century, libraries began to allow readers to take books from the shelves themselves, a system known as open access. It was popular with readers, though some librarians feared for the condition of their stock, and it changed the design of library buildings, since shelves now had to be arranged so that people could walk among them.

Walk through any cathedral close or old town centre in Britain and the chances are that some of the buildings are being repaired. Look closely at the work and you may notice that the materials are not those of an ordinary building site. The mortar is softer and paler; the stone has been matched to a quarry that may have closed a century ago; the roof is lead or stone slate rather than tile. The people doing the work are among the scarcest in the construction industry, and their skills are poorly understood even within it.

Repairing an old building demands knowledge that general construction training does not supply. Traditional structures are designed to move and to let moisture pass through their walls; sealing them with cement renders and modern waterproofing can trap water and slowly destroy the stone. A craftsperson has to recognise the material in front of them, choose a compatible replacement and understand how the whole structure behaves. Errors are expensive and often irreversible, since a badly repointed wall may take decades to show the damage. The skills involved are learned slowly, by watching and repeating.

Everyone in the sector agrees that these skills are in short supply. Traditional crafts appear on lists of occupations that employers struggle to fill, and many practitioners are close to retirement. Heritage charities have warned that some of these crafts could be lost within a generation unless training is funded now. Historically the crafts were passed on through apprenticeship: the statute of 1563 required a seven-year term, and although that system was dismantled in 1814, the model of learning beside an experienced worker survived in small firms long afterwards. Today, however, few firms take on apprentices at all.

Large contractors, whose voice carries most weight in these discussions, make two objections. The first is one of scale. Heritage work forms a very small proportion of what the construction industry does, and for a major company it may be less than one per cent of turnover, so a dedicated training place is hard to justify. The second concerns rules. Apprenticeship standards are written around mainstream work — new-build housing, commercial refurbishment, infrastructure — and the funding attached to them follows completion of those standards. A programme that added lime work and stone repair would take longer and cost more, and the money available does not reflect that.

The alternative, favoured by many in the sector, is to treat conservation as a specialism to be added later. Colleges report that the great majority of students on their conservation courses are already experienced tradespeople, often in their thirties, who have come to see that old buildings are where the interesting work is. Some arrive with a decade of site experience behind them and still find that lime work demands a different way of thinking. On this argument, a young person should first become a good bricklayer or joiner, and only then learn how those trades are adapted to historic fabric.

There is force in this, but it has an uncomfortable consequence. If specialist training is always something added after a craft qualification, it will be available mainly to people who can afford to pause and retrain, and to those whose employers will release them. The pipeline narrows at every stage. A publicly funded system that only trains people who are already trained is not really widening access; it is subsidising a small and self-selecting group. That is not an argument against specialist courses, but it is an argument about who pays for them and when.

The structure of the industry matters here too. Most firms that repair historic buildings are small, often with fewer than ten employees, and they cannot easily carry an apprentice who spends part of the week at college and part of it needing supervision. Specialist contractors say that the funding system is designed for employers much larger than themselves. Rules made with big companies in mind tend to reward those that can guarantee a full programme and to penalise those that cannot. The result is that the firms with the most to teach are the least able to take on a learner, while the firms best placed to claim the money may have no conservation work at all.

My own view is that heritage skills should be part of apprenticeships, but as a distinct route in the final year rather than as an occasional afternoon visit. The first two years of a construction apprenticeship teach things that are genuinely common to all work: safe handling of tools, reading drawings, understanding materials, working to a specification. The divergence comes later, when tolerances tighten and the questions become harder — what mortar, what stone, what happens if we get it wrong. That is where a conservation route belongs, with its own assessment and its own funding.

Framed this way, the choice between a broad apprenticeship and a narrow specialism is a false one. The real questions are where the specialisation begins, how it is paid for, and whether the small firms that hold the knowledge are given any reason to pass it on. What is needed is not a return to the seven-year term but a funding system that recognises where the extra year of training falls, and pays for it there. Those are questions of policy, not of tradition.