Biblioteca Antonelliana

A cardinal's books took fifty-eight years to reach Senigallia. When Cardinal Nicola Antonelli died in 1767 he left his library to the city as a public reading room; the crates arrived only in 1825. Since 1998 the Biblioteca Antonelliana has kept over eighty thousand documents on the first floor of the Foro Annonario.

Why it matters

This is Senigallia's library of record, and its biography is as instructive as its shelves. Named for a cardinal scholar who wanted ordinary citizens to read, it has survived inheritance lawsuits, religious suppressions, a prefect's closure order and an earthquake, changing address each time yet never losing its civic purpose. The official history page traces that whole path, which makes the institution a compact lesson in how Italian civic culture was built and defended. It preserves an eighteenth-century legacy within the restored upper floor of the city's market ring.

What to notice

The reading rooms occupy the first floor of the Foro Annonario and the adjoining former slaughterhouse building. The library's arched brick setting forms part of the ring of arcades around the market, while the circular architecture gives the reading areas an intimate scale.

The collection's core is Cardinal Nicola Antonelli's own bequest, enriched in 1860 when the suppression of religious orders brought in the books of the Servites and Capuchins. Among the named fonds are the library of Cardinal Domenico Consolini, the papers of the Marcolini family, and deposits such as Augusti/Arsilli, Sciocchetti, Padovano, Mondolfo, Mariani, Monsignor Alberto Polverari and the notary Mazzetti. The collection also includes roughly two hundred posters and letters documenting the history of the city's old Teatro La Fenice, a children's section of about ten thousand documents, a digital library and a historic archive.

Context and history

The institution's dates map the ups and downs of Italian public culture. Cardinal Nicola Antonelli, born at Pergola on 8 July 1698, spent his career in Rome as an ecclesiastical figure and passionate scholar; dying in 1767, he willed his books to Senigallia to create a place of public reading, with delivery postponed until after his nephew Leonardo's death. The Comune had to sue the heirs: the volumes finally arrived in 1825 and were shelved in two rooms of the municipal palace, and in 1828 canon Antonio Simoncelli became the first librarian. A move to the palazzo of the Collegio Pio on piazza del Duomo followed, with the collection entrusted to the Jesuits alongside the school founded under Pius IX.

The nineteenth century's end of ecclesiastical privilege fed the shelves in 1860; the twentieth century nearly starved them. By 1930 neglect was such that the prefect ordered the library closed, and after the earthquake the books were moved again, to palazzo Gherardi on via Portici Ercolani. Since 1998 the library has lived on the first floor of the Foro Annonario and the ex-macelli building, and since 1994 it has taken part in the national library network (SBN), conserving a patrimony that now exceeds eighty thousand documents.