At the five ITSERR locations you will find the following national libraries and museums:
Together with the world-famous monuments of the Miracles field and the Universitarian libraries of the city, at Pisa you can also discover relevant libraries.
Cathariniana Library
This public library, founded in the 13th-century in the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, is affiliated with the Archbishop’s Seminary (Seminario Arcivescovile). The collections are composed of two main parts: antique and modern. The antique collection houses nearly 12.000 books, including 2000 from the 15th century, 98 incunabula, and 222 manuscript books. The modern collection has over 20.000 volumes from 1830 onward, including 150 journals no longer published. The main topics of the collections are Theology, Patristic and History of the Church. Particularly relevant is the complete collection of the journal L’Osservatore Romano.
The cities of Modena and Reggio Emilia are well known for their important monumental heritage, but they are also very rich in specialized libraries:
Estense Library (Modena)
Placed within Palazzo dei Musei in the downtown of Modena – the Estense Library, whose collection includes printed books, incunabula and a large assortment of illuminated manuscripts from the 14th to the 16th centuries. The centrepiece is the Bible that belonged to Borso d’Este, a 15th-century masterwork of illuminated miniature of the Ferrara School.
Diocesan Historical Archive of Modena
The Archive preserves the documents related to the cathedral of Modena (from Lombard period to recent days). The most precious nucleus is the one constituted by the manuscript codices that reached Modena over the centuries.
Theological Library “City of Reggio”
The Library hosts a modern librarian heritage about theology and philosophy, with specific sections, between the others, dedicated to: Patrology, History of the Church, Liturgy, Religions, Canonical law, Judaism.
The city of Naples is renowned for its huge, monumental and artistic heritage, but it is also a perfect place for researchers for its huge and old librarian heritage.
The Girolamini’s Library
It is the elder library of Naples (1586), located within the astonishing architectonic complex of the Girolamini’s Church. Within its collections there are texts on Philosophy, Christian Theology, History of the Church and Sacred Music. It hoses more than 159.700 volumes, including old manuscripts.
National Library Vittorio Emanuele III
The National Library in Naples is the third most important library in Italy with a patrimony of around 19.000 manuscripts, 4.563 incunabula, 1.792 Herculaneum papyri, around 1.800.000 printed volumes and 8.300 journals.
Within the Museum system of UniOr you can find two important museums, connected to the study of Africa and the Eastern regions.
The Eastern Museum “Umberto Scerrato”
The museum is dedicated to the archaeologist Umberto Scerrato (1928-2004), the first Professor of Eastern Archaeology at this University who started the collection to create didactic museum. The museums is organized in three main different sections.
Islam: it displays funerary stelae from Fustat (Egypt, 9th century), pottery and metal vessels (from the Mesopotamian and Iranian area (9th-12th centuries) and archaeological findings from Italian missions at Ghazni (Afghanistan,11th-12th centuries), coins and their plaster casts.
Eastern Africa: the exhibition is dedicated to pottery and naturalistic findings from Sudan (6th-1st millennium B.C.),from Eritrea and Ethiopia (1st millennium B.C. – 1st millennium A.D.) and lithic findings from Ancient Near East and Northen Arabia (8th-6th millennium B.C.). Seals from Ancient Mesopotamia and from the near regions (3d millennium B.C.-5th century d.C.), a reproduced Elamite stele and vessels from eastern Arabia (9th-1st centuries B.C.)
North-West India: the section houses sculptures dated between the 8th-10th centuries.
China: the section exhibits the great map of China by Matteo Ripa (1682-1746), missionary at the court of Emperor Kangxi, who founded the Collegium of Chineses, whose born s at the radici of University of Naples l’Orientale. Moreover, it displays vessels and fragments from Hormuz, blue and white China porcelain 15th -16th century and a wooden sculpture bodhisattva Guanyin and a one of golden bronze of Buddha Amitayus (1770). Finally, the section displays two Japanese calligraphies of the beginning of the 20th century.
The Museum of the African Society of Italy
The museum reflects the holistic approach in the study of the African continent between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It displays documents related to the area under the Italian colonialism with a transversal collection: music instruments, personal ornaments, art crafts, archeological findings such as two Ptolemaic mummies from Egyptian necropolis.
The city of Palermo has a huge monumental and librarian heritage:
Diocesan Museum
The Museum was opened in 1927 and located at Archbishop’s Palace by Cardinal Archbishop Alessandro Lualdi. At the beginning the collection, selected by Monsignor Guido Anichini, housed prominently the sculptures that decorated the Cathedral, before it was transformed according to the neoclassical fashion based on a project by the Florentine architect Ferdinando Fuga at the end of the 18th century. Thus Renaissance and Baroque reliefs could be observed in the museum, as well as other finds from churches that had been destroyed or no longer used. Added to this was a significant loan of works from the National Museum of Palermo (now the Regional Gallery of Palazzo Abatellis) which included, among other things, paintings by Giorgio Vasari, Marco Pino, Bartolomeo Schedoni and Antonio Alberti, known as Barbalonga, the latter two still on display today.
Palazzo Branciforte
This important ancient palace of Palermo houses some relevant artistic collections of Fondazione Sicilia (archaeology, numismatic, ancient stamps, ancient majolica’s, sculptures of the 19th and 20th centuries and a library with approximately 50 thousand volumes. A large and varied section deals with the history of Sicily, history of art, coins and archaeology.Inside the spacious reading hall on the first floor, encyclopaedias, annuals and dictionaries can be consulted, as well as periodicals, miscellany and monographs on a range of different subjects. The library’s ancient library fund boasts many publications printed between 1501 and 1830. Two other estates of fundamental documental and historical importance are the Restivo Estate (donated by the heirs of Franco Restivo, the famous man of politics and Sicilian university professor, boasts approximately 8,000 volumes devoted to Sicily as well as to history, law, art, philosophy and literature)
“Central Library for the Sicilian Church in the Pontifical Sicilian Faculty of Theology San Giovanni Evangelista”
“Central Library for the Sicilian Church in the Pontifical Sicilian Faculty of Theology San Giovanni Evangelista” (FATESI). The collection is about theological, biblical and philosophical tomes, but also offers philological and historical documents with particular reference to Sicily.
The pieces of the valuable Antiquarian core Collection come mainly from the Seminary Library, at this moment being reorganised and housed in the 16th century Chapel of Santa Barbara. It consists of manuscripts, incunabula and a significant group of books from the 16th century. However, the most important collections are from the 17th and 18th century with around 12,000 volumes.
Giorgio La Pira Library
Giorgio La Pira Library is a specialised library on the doctrinal, linguistic, and cultural varieties of Islam. Modelled on FSCIRE’s seventy-year experience, it was born at the end of 2018 as a branch of the Dossetti Library. The Library currently has more than 21,000 paper volumes and approximately 900,000 works in digital format, of which more than 270,000 manuscripts, in addition to magazines in various Western languages, Arabic and Persian. Only one manuscript, a Koranic text from the 18th century, is in the library. This entire collection of books is the result of purchases and donations from public agencies and private individuals.
Municipal Library
The Palermo Municipal Library. The entire collection, of around 370,000 documents, makes it one of the most prestigious Libraries of Southern Italy. First in order of importance is, without doubt, the Martyrologium from the Chapel of San Pietro inside the Royal Palace, a parchment scroll dating from the 12t The Public Library also offers a service to a wider public through the OPAC of the PA1 Polo, which enables online consultation of catalogues.
Officina di Studi Medievali
The library is dedicated to the Medieval Studies and houses more than 42.278 volumes, catalogued within the OPAC system and a wide journal collection.
Turin is a real cultural hub, with very important libraries and museums to discover. Here a selection of the ones to do not miss for your TNA stay for your research:
Royal Library
The librarian heritage of the Royal Library is composed by over 200.000 volumes, ancient papers, engravings and illuminated manuscripts; it is the result of the enrichment of the collection established in 1831 by Charles Albert of Savoy-Carignano.
Art Library
Established in the early 1930s to offer support to bibliographic research on the collections of the Museums of Turin, the Art Library – which belongs to Fondazione Torino Musei – is specialized in ancient, modern, and contemporary art history, art criticism, museology, archaeology, ethnography, and numismatics.
Egyptian Museum
The Egyptian Museum is the oldest Egyptian museum in the world, second in terms of importance only to that of Cairo, housing relics covering an extensive period of time, from the Paleolithic to the Coptic, and offering a broad and fascinating vision of ancient Egypt, its art and its culture.
Royal Museums
Within the several collections of the Royal Museums there is the Archaeological Gallery, whose ten halls house relics until the Roman age, with the famous gallery of the Emperors. One of them houses the collection dedicated to the Ancient Near East, specifically to the Assyrian relics (included within the collections in 1847), with the richest Italian collection of cuneiform texts and cylinder seals which is actually part of the research of ITSERR WP9-TAURUS team.