Built in 1997 on a project by Arrigo Rudi with the collaboration of the architects Domenico Pasquale and Giovanni Tonti, the Dante Alighieri Municipal Library currently preserves over 180,000 books including rare 242 incunabula, 1638 sixteenth century first-editions and 712 manuscripts, as well as 533 old prints, 600 drawings by the architect Giuseppe Piermarini, 26,000 photographs and 1,200 photographic plates by Rinaldo Laurentini. The Municipal Library is, not surprisingly, named after Dante Alighieri as it is also a Documentation Center on the Divine Comedy, which makes available to the public over 300 different editions of the poet’s masterpiece - including some very prestigious ones like the incunabula – and reductions, artistic versions and commentaries of the famous poem.
