Biblioteca Aprosiana

The Biblioteca Aprosiana is the civic library of the city of Ventimiglia, Italy. It was the first public library to be opened in Liguria and one of the oldest in Italy.

History


Founded in 1648 by Angelico Aprosio, it was initially based in the convent of the Augustinians of Ventimiglia, to whose order Aprosio himself belonged. In 1653 it was officially recognized by Pope Innocent X, who, aware of the importance of the library, tried to safeguard its contents through a special provision which threatened with excommunication anyone who traded or otherwise removed books from it.

During the Seven Years' War, the Augustinian convent of Ventimiglia suffered serious damage and looting. At the end of the 1790s the Napoleonic invasion caused the loss of part of the bibliographic heritage, which was sold to some important Ligurian families (including the Durazzo family) or merged into various Genoese libraries.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the library came to be administered by the Municipality of Ventimiglia, which transferred all the surviving material it contained to various buildings in the upper city: first to the Church of San Francesco, then to an adjacent building, and finally, following of the earthquake of 1887 and thanks to the active contribution of Thomas Hanbury, in the then Civico Teatro (also known as the "Lascaris Theatre").

Current consistency
Currently, thanks also to the work carried out in recent decades by some particularly active and capable librarians, the library hosts a collection of approximately twenty-six thousand volumes, of which over seven thousand belong to the so-called Ancient Fund. To these must be added almost two hundred incunabula and manuscripts, some of them of exceptional historical value (among which it is necessary to mention a variant, unique in its kind, of the Obras by Luis de Góngora), as well as a picture gallery of around ten portraits (among which that of Aprosio himself, executed by Carlo Ridolfi in 1647).