After about a year of construction work, on Christmas day in 1995 the Vatican website, www.vatican.va, went online. It was a small undertaking well told in a book by Gianluca Dettori and Debora Ferrero dedicated to the reconstruction of some stories ofItaly in the network.
In the book it turns out that one of the main architects of the Vatican’s online landing fu suor Judith Zoebelein. She was born in the United States, belonged to the Franciscan order of the Eucharist and arrived in Rome in 1991 to deal with the computerization of the Vatican, having directed the creation of computer networks of various entities, such as Caritas.
The nun arrived in Rome in September 1991 with the task of to move the Vatican from the old mainframe system (a single, large central computer) to personal computers. But it soon became clear that the nascent World Wide Web was revolutionizing people’s approach to the Internet and this made it necessary to build an online presence of the Church. It was the Pope’s spokesman, Joaquin Navarro Valls, who spoke to the pontiff about it. AND John Paul II agreed. According to Sister Judith, “Pope Wojtyla, although he did not use technology himself, was convinced of its usefulness … With his support and his approval, we began to work on the construction of the site involving Joy Marino in the first place. for servers and connectivity “(Joy Marino, Internet pioneer, already told in this Almanac).
One of the best Web agencies of the time was chosen as agency, Glamm (a name where each letter stood for one of the partners: Gianfranco Pocecai, Luca Barbareschi, Alberto Fattori, Mario Di Floriano and Marco Locatelli). In the book by Dettori and Ferrero, Alberto Fattori tells several interesting things: the first is to have contributed to decline an offer from Bill Gates’ Microsoft, who would do everything for free, but put his logo on the pages; the second was the choice to “let the smell of the Vatican Library smell”, putting a parchment in the background (“one of the longest-lived looks on the Web, still visible”).
On Christmas morning 1995, while the Pope pronounced the Urbi et Orbi blessing in St. Peter’s, the site went online with the text of the speech. According to Repubblica, in the first 48 hours there were 300 thousand contacts, a triumph for the time; And the Pope received 3,000 messages in his mailbox. Sister Judith recalls: “Being able to write him an email made him close, made him feel like a friend to whom you could send your thoughts”.
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