Ateneo di Salò (Biblioteca in Palazzo Fantoni)

Founded on 20 May 1564 as the Accademia degli Unanimi, the Ateneo di Salò is the oldest cultural institution of Salò still at work. Its library keeps some 27,000 volumes, including incunabula printed from 1480 and more than a thousand sixteenth-century editions.

Why it matters

Renaissance academies usually died young; Salò's did not. The Ateneo's own historical account records that the Accademia degli Unanimi was instituted on 20 May 1564, a day consecrated to Saint Bernardino of Siena, on the initiative of the poet Giuseppe Milio Voltolina together with 158 other young men of the town, and that it alone of the many academies of the area survived the upheavals of the following centuries, supported not only by the Magnifica Patria but by the Republic of Venice itself. Recreated by decree on 25 December 1810 as its direct heir, the institution continues today as a private cultural body with a library, a historical archive and a research programme. The Comune, in its official presentation, describes it as the most ancient cultural institution of the city and underlines a collection that includes numerous cinquecentine. The institution’s history presents Salò as a centre of learning as well as leisure.

What to notice

The library is the point. Its patrimony of about 27,000 volumes is organised into named fonds that repay slow browsing of the catalogues: the Fondo Benacense, devoted to Garda, Valsabbia and Valtenesi subjects and searchable online through the institution's own database; the incunabula collection of thirty-seven volumes printed between 1480 and 1499, recorded in the 2010 census of Lombard libraries; and 1,204 sixteenth-century volumes, with a further 202 recovered items undergoing description. Alongside the books stands the historical manuscript archive, kept in the same building under regional and ministerial rules; within it, the Fondo Giuseppe Brunati documents the activity of a local priest from 1813 to his death in 1855. The academy's identity shows in its emblems: a swarm of bees around a hive with Virgil's "idem ardor", drawn by Giovanni Conter, and Saint Ambrose as patron, protector of the industrious insect.

Context and history

The Unanimi were founded in the generation after the Council of Trent, in a Salò that governed the Gardesana for Venice, and their statutes mixed study with piety and, notably, music: within a few years the academy hired a resident music master and organised concerts, a tradition that the institution's musical programmes still echo. Surviving the plague of 1577, the academy earned the licence to build its own seat under the patronage of Alessandro Pallavicini, governor of the Venetian militias; hard seventeenth-century decades, including the dispersal of much of the early manuscript archive during the military crises around Mantua, were followed by recovery under Venetian protection. The Napoleonic reorganisation of 25 December 1810 reconstituted the body as the Ateneo, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added publications and reprints, among them anastatic editions of Bongianni Grattarolo's 1599 history of the Riviera. The seat at Via Marco Leonesio, the building the municipality calls the Palazzo della Cultura and that guidebooks identify as Palazzo Fantoni, has housed the library and archive in the heart of the town.