Biblioteca Teresiana

Mantua's public library began as an Enlightenment project: opened on 30 March 1780 under Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, it turned the suppressed Jesuits' college collection into a library for the citizens. Architect Paolo Pozzo's Teresian rooms, with their eighteenth-century walnut shelving, remain the centrepiece.

Why it matters

When the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, the books of its Mantuan college — previously reserved for teachers and students — became the basis of a new Imperial Regia Biblioteca, open to all: an Enlightenment gesture that turned a college library into civic property. Maria Theresa's reform made it a library open to every citizen from the start, and Pozzo designed two rooms to house it, completed in 1780 and named the Teresian rooms after the empress who founded the institution. After Mantua joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 the library passed to the state, and in 1881 to the city, which still runs it. Few Italian cities preserve a working library whose Enlightenment reading rooms survive intact and in daily use.

What to notice

The aula, or main hall, keeps its original eighteenth-century walnut shelving and holds around 44,000 volumes of the historic collection. Pozzo conceived the shelving, galleries and reading desks as a single architectural ensemble. The Sala delle Vedute is used for teaching programmes and civic events. The library's special holdings reward browsing even before you enter the halls: manuscript items including a celebrated chess manuscript, a Jewish library collection, nautical charts, and historic maps of Mantua — all featured collections of the institution. A digital collection of more than 520,000 images — manuscripts, paintings, and globes by Vincenzo Coronelli — extends the holdings well beyond the walls of the building, and the historic rooms are complemented by further rare and unique manuscripts and paintings.

Context and history

The Jesuit college that once occupied this entire block shaped the library's character: its scholarly collections, catalogued by subject, gave the new institution a serious research base. Restoration work begun in March 2008 and completed with the 2011 reopening renewed shelving, lighting and air conditioning — every one of the roughly 44,000 books in the Teresian rooms had to be removed while the historic shelving was restored — and the careful dismantling of the historic rooms later supported scholarly study of paper degradation. Today the Biblioteca Teresiana remains the city's principal public library, run by the Comune di Mantova.