Biblioteca Civica Queriniana di Brescia

Brescia, Italy

Contacts

Via Mazzini, 1, 25121 Brescia BS, Italy

+39 030 297 8210

https://queriniana.comune.brescia.it/

Description

The Queriniana Library was established in 1747 by the bishop of Brescia, card. Angelo Maria Querini, who, in addition to establishing the destination of the book collections for public use and providing the library with sources of income, also saw to the construction of the palace which is still its headquarters today. It was opened to the public in 1750 and, for the following decades, it also served as a museum and home to the city's learned academies.

Starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous private legacies converged in the library, mostly dismembered and merged with the general book heritage. In 1797 the Provisional City Government transformed the Queriniana into the "National Library", assigning it to house the libraries of ecclesiastical and religious bodies which in the meantime had been suppressed.

Currently the Queriniana is the central library of the Urban Library System of Brescia, also made up of two specialist libraries, eight neighborhood libraries, a library for teenagers, a newspaper library, a media library and three reading rooms. The heritage of the Queriniana is approximately 600,000 printed volumes, both ancient and modern (approximately 150,000 make up the ancient collection, of which 1158 incunabula and 8386 sixteenth century editions) and over 10,000 manuscripts, including codices, loose documents and epistolary materials.