Biblioteca Guarneriana

Founded in 1466 by the parish priest Guarnerio d'Artegna, the Guarneriana is one of Italy's earliest public-reading institutions and the oldest library in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Its historic collections include manuscripts, illuminated books and early printed works.

Why it matters

Guarnerio endowed the church of San Michele in San Daniele with 173 manuscript codices, stipulating that the books remain together for reading and study. The collection became one of the most coherent libraries of Italian humanism. Its holdings include the Byzantine Bible and manuscripts of Dante, and readers associated with the library over time include Ugo Foscolo, Ippolito Nievo and Giosuè Carducci.

What to notice

The twelfth-century manuscript known as the Bibbia bizantina is a large parchment volume from the last quarter of the 1100s. It contains twenty-one large figured initials, more than a thousand smaller initials and 175 illuminated headings in red and cobalt blue. Its place of origin remains debated, with proposed connections to a Jerusalem scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre or a Byzantine-influenced workshop in southern Italy. The library also preserves a fourteenth-century codex of Dante's Inferno and wooden shelving financed through the eighteenth-century Fontanini bequest. Digitised manuscripts form part of the library's documentary heritage.

Context and history

The collection grew through later gifts and acquisitions. In 1736, Monsignor Giusto Fontanini enlarged it and provided funds for monumental wooden shelving. In 1749 the community acquired a late-fifteenth-century codex of Petrarch's Canzoniere and Trionfi. During the Napoleonic period, French commissioner Gaspare Monge ordered the manuscripts seized; a story preserved by the local tourism portal credits the librarian's feigned forgetfulness with limiting the losses. The Guarneriana also preserves the municipal historical archive and the archive of the former Ospedale di Sant'Antonio, extending its role beyond that of a manuscript library.