Biblioteca Diocesana di Santa Chiara

Behind the baroque church of Santa Chiara, three rooms of Sulmona's former Poor Clares monastery hold the diocesan library, where the reading room still uses the speak-room through which cloistered nuns once spoke to the outside world.

Why it matters

The diocesan library in the Santa Chiara complex preserves the collection canon Virgilio Orsini built up in the 1960s, including works on the local history of Abruzzo and the Kingdom of Naples. Today the collection exceeds eighteen thousand volumes and adds the books and papers of the jurist and philosopher Giuseppe Capograssi, plus an extensive newspaper archive of the city's own press. The setting is part of the collection: the reading room occupies the monastery's ancient parlatorio, where heavy grilles were for centuries the only point of contact between the enclosed sisters and their visitors.

What to notice

The reading room's grilles preserve a trace of how the cloistered community managed the boundary between enclosure and city. The library spreads through three rooms of the conventual building on the ground floor of the Polo Culturale Civico Diocesano, alongside the Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art and the municipal picture gallery in the same complex. The shelves reflect Orsini's programmatic choice: local and southern Italian history, including an important Abruzzo section and studies of the Kingdom of Naples, alongside the Capograssi fond and items of bibliographic value.

Context and history

The library began life as the library of the diocesan seminary, transformed by Orsini's acquisitions in the 1960s. Its present home has a much longer story: the monastery founded by the Beata Floresella, daughter of the count of Palena, ranks among the oldest settlements of Poor Clares in the Kingdom of Naples, and it was here that the religious order's reform — still in force — was formulated. Earthquakes in 1456 and 1706 forced repeated rebuilding, leaving little of the original fabric; the baroque church and convent seen today are largely eighteenth-century work. After the suppression of 1866 the buildings passed to state and then municipal ownership in 1907, serving as school, kindergarten, old people's home, cinema and playground, before the cultural hub was created. The library reopened in its present rooms in December 2002, managed under a convention between the Abruzzo superintendency, the diocese and the municipality, and is dedicated to its founder.