Biblioteca Statale di Cremona

The State Library of Cremona has occupied one wing of Renaissance Palazzo Affaitati since 1938. Its collections include some 600,000 volumes, medieval manuscripts and Rembrandt etchings.

Why it matters

This is the library that keeps Cremona's written memory. Rooted in the library of the city's Jesuit college and opened to the public by Empress Maria Theresa shortly after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, with the local Enlightenment figure Giambattista Biffi driving the undertaking, it became a state library and moved into the sixteenth-century Palazzo Affaitati in 1938, sharing the building with the Ala Ponzone Civic Museum. Today it manages both state funds and the civic collection under a convention with the city dating to 1885, bringing scholarly and civic collections together under one roof.

What to notice

The palace's ceremonial staircase is a notable example of sixteenth-century domestic architecture in Cremona. The 1930s conversion rebuilt the north-east wing for the book stacks; a 1970 extension added storage and expanded the library's children's section, founded in 1938.

The collections are the real treasure: about 3,000 manuscripts including some 200 Latin codices of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, roughly 3,000 parchments from the eighth century onward, 402 incunabula, six thousand sixteenth-century editions and 108 etchings by Rembrandt. Digitised material includes the Cozio fund — the papers of Count Ignazio Alessandro Cozio di Salaberto, remembered as the first historian of Cremonese violin making — a document group that ties the library directly to the city's musical identity.

Context and history

The library's dual inheritance shapes everything about it. The governmental fund descends from the Jesuit college library established in the early seventeenth century; after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Empress Maria Theresa's reform opened it to the public. The civic fund grew from the Ala Ponzone collection, deposited from 1885 under a convention renewed in 2006. When the state library moved into Palazzo Affaitati in 1938, the conversion works transformed a noble residence into a modern library while preserving its Renaissance rooms, and the 1970 wing extension gave it twentieth-century capacity. It remains an institute of the Ministry of Culture.