Mattarella starts work on Art History Library at Quirinale: Culture our soul

A groundbreaking ceremony was held this morning at the Quirinal Palace for the new Library of Archaeology and Art History of Rome, which will be housed in the San Felice Palace within the Quirinal complex. The building, which used to house the Quirinal’s service quarters, will be restored with a design by Mario Botta, who made his proposal free of charge. This morning’s ceremony was attended by Culture Minister Dario Franceschini (who was present via video link), architect Mario Botta, the secretary general of the “Giorgio Cini” Foundation, Renata Codello, and the director of the Agenzia del Demanio, Alessandra Dal Verme.

Currently the Library, the most important in Italy for the sector with a patrimony of more than 400,000 volumes, founded in 1875 and an international reference point, has its headquarters in Palazzo Venezia: however, the spaces of the historic Renaissance building that between the 16th and 18th centuries was the seat of the Venetian ambassadors in Rome are no longer suitable to accommodate the large library. The new headquarters in Palazzo San Felice will open around the large courtyard with a palm tree in the center, overlooking Via della Dataria (and which will become a kind of square complete with a cafeteria), and will have conference rooms and multifunctional rooms on the ground floor, on the second floor the storerooms, which will enjoy as much as 15 thousand linear meters of shelving, on the second the reading and study rooms, and on the third an exhibition space with terraces. The work, financed with more than 10 million euros, is scheduled for completion in December 2024. Three years then for the new Library.

“The ministry,” said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, “has been committed both in finding the resources and in supporting the Quirinale in this operation that gives a great message to the country: Palazzo San Felice will be a wonderful place, open to the city. Architect Botta’s design makes it clear that it will not just be a place of preservation, but a place of life and activity. We will bring from Palazzo Venezia the wonderful Library of Archaeology and Art History, one of the most important institutions in the country, they are more than 400.000 volumes, incunabula, photographic material, an infinite archive that today is in inadequate spaces in Palazzo Venezia, and since we have made a choice to create as one of the new autonomous museums Palazzo Venezia and Vittoriano together (and this will also be a great restitution to Italy and the city of Rome), and the choice to bring it to Palazzo San Felice will give it a new centrality. An operation that I am very happy is starting today.”

“We bring life, we bring current events to this place of history and memory,” Mario Botta stresses. “We take a piece of ancient Rome to actualize Rome: it is our task, a generational task that wants each generation to interpret to the best of its ability the contemporary and therefore its way of being men on earth today. We bear the burden of a responsibility that goes beyond what little we are able to do, and that pushes us to interpret best not so much for ourselves, but for the next generations. We create a future.”

“I am indeed very pleased,” said President Sergio Mattarella, “that before the end of my seven-year term, work will begin to realize this great project, a choice of great significance. I emphasize that this is a great cultural operation, which gives the city of Rome, in its center, a dynamic place of study, which preserves a great heritage of our country’s culture and which looks to the future, because it is by collecting and making available to scholars, those of today and those of the future, this great heritage that the library will contain, that means projecting into the future the culture that our country has accumulated over the centuries. The culture that is the soul of our country and that makes its prospects for the future more reassuring, because without that dimension every other activity, commitment or side of social life loses meaning and hardly finds its own dimension and awareness. I am very grateful for what has been done. Three years is a reasonably short time for such a demanding work, and it is a great achievement: the project that architect Botta has given us and that with such skill and wisdom of image and division makes it possible to really make this building and this complex a truly living reality of the city center. The Quirinal is delighted to have made this building available for this purpose, and what we are doing together and starting today is really a great contribution to the future of our country.”

Mattarella starts work on Art History Library at Quirinale: Culture our soul

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