1496 è un taccuino di appunti digitale. Se avesse una missione, sarebbe quella descritta (magnificamente) da Curt Sachs:
Even the most elementary history should impart to its students a notion of the limited scope of the time in which we live and a sense of the vast horizons that a knowledge of the past unrolls.
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Even the most elementary history should make its readers aware that the world of today and of ourselves is only a link in the endless chain of ages, each of which has tried to create a supreme expression of its mind and its rend, of its faith and its will.
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And even the most elementary history should be free from the outworn, naive concept that such a chain represents a development from stages immature, preparatory, and therefore negligible, to unprecedented climaxes.
Curt Sachs, 1948