It is known that, in the Middle Ages, both the Orient and the Occident employed the roll, in particularly in liturgical context, with the text nearly always arranged parallel to the short side (‘scroll’). For the Latin world, the most notable example is the typology of the Exsultet (the hymn sung during the Easter Vigil announcing the triumph of light of the resurrection over darkness of the death), limited, with isolated exceptions, to southern Lombard Italy and concentrated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. An attractive, though problematic, hypothesis, traces the origins of the Exsultet to the model of the Greek liturgical roll, assuming for the latter an uninterrupted tradition from the Late Antiquity – even if not documented by surviving examples, – and also an early presence (before the first Latin attestations) in southern Byzantine Italy.