Accademia dei Concordi

The Accademia dei Concordi, founded in Rovigo in 1580, remains the city's principal public library and a major cultural institution of the Polesine. Its library holds about 300,000 volumes, including incunabula; its art collection is now displayed in Palazzo Roverella.

Why it matters

Count Gaspare Campo founded the Accademia in 1580. For more than four centuries it has served as a learned society, library and custodian of the Polesine's cultural heritage. Its library is also Rovigo's civic library and the principal one in the province. The academy's picture collection includes works by Venetian painters, among them Giovanni Bellini, Palma il Vecchio, Giambattista Tiepolo and Piazzetta.

What to notice

Sante Baseggio designed the academy's neoclassical palace, completed in 1814. The library is organised into Conservation, Public Reading and Children's sections; the children's Multispazio opened in 2004 in adjoining Palazzo Nagliati. The academy also holds archaeological collections, including the Camillo Silvestri collection and an Egyptian collection assembled by Giuseppe Valsè Pantellini. The motto associated with Girolamo Silvestri, “l'amor del pubblico bene” (“love of the public good”), expresses the institution's civic purpose.

Context and history

The Accademia's picture collection grew from eighteenth-century portraits of notable people from Rovigo, commissioned from Venetian painters, and was enlarged by gifts from the Casalini brothers and other families. A contract in 1833 established shared ownership with the municipality. After the division of the Silvestri legacy in the 1870s, the seminary's share returned to the academy in 1982. The pinacoteca comprises several hundred works spanning Venetian painting from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including Nicolò di Pietro's Coronation of the Virgin, two paintings by Giovanni Bellini, a Flagellation attributed to Palma il Vecchio, a portrait attributed to Tiepolo and Piazzetta's San Gaetano da Thiene. The collection is displayed in Palazzo Roverella.