Biblioteca Palatina

The Palatina Library is one of Italy's great Enlightenment libraries. Created in 1761 by Duke Philip of Bourbon as a public instrument of learning, it combines a monumental Enlightenment hall with 700,000 volumes, thousands of incunabula and manuscripts.

Why it matters

The Palatina was born political. The official history published by the Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta records that on 1 August 1761 don Filippo di Borbone, Duke of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, appointed the Turinese theatine Paolo Maria Paciaudi as Antiquarian and Librarian by decree, an openly Enlightenment project promoted by his prime minister Guillaume Du Tillot to give the duchy a public library for every branch of study. The task was urgent because the Farnese book collections had left with Carlo in 1736 for Naples, so Parma had to build a library from nothing. What resulted became one of the cultural landmarks of the city, and it remains part of Parma's cultural life inside the Pilotta.

What to notice

Paciaudi's library is arranged on neoclassical wooden shelving designed by French architect E. A. Petitot in the long hall called the Galleria Petitot. Unable to acquire existing collections, Paciaudi ordered books through catalogues and correspondence with more than a thousand learned contacts across Europe, then arranged them in six classes: Theology, Nomologia, Philosophy, History, Philology, and the Liberal and Mechanical Arts. He catalogued on loose cards rather than a bound register, an innovation for Italy, and wrote scholarly prefaces for the manuscripts. The collections comprise more than 700,000 volumes, 3,000 incunabula, 6,600 manuscripts, 50,000 prints and illuminated codices of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Context and history

The library's identity shifted with each regime, as its string of former names shows — Royal Parmesan Library, National Library, Bibliothèque Impériale, Bibliothèque de la Ville de Parme, Biblioteca Ducale and back to Biblioteca Nazionale — before settling as Biblioteca Palatina. It held the right of printing from 1768 and was inaugurated in May 1769 in the presence of Emperor Joseph II; the court bindery served the printing works directed by Giambattista Bodoni, whose museum lies in the same complex. Paciaudi resigned in 1774 after the fall of Du Tillot turned court opinion hostile, but the institution outlived its politics. The library also keeps a music section housed at the Arrigo Boito Conservatory, a reminder that Parma's book and music histories are one story.