Open day at the Uffizi Library with 78,600 titles

FLORENCE, ITALY – Today, Friday, March 30 the Uffizi Library will be open for an Open Day from 2 to 5 pm.

During the extraordinary opening to the general public, the staff will be on hand to listen to the history of the Library and its collections and let see some of the most significant works, watch the process of binding of a book or a periodical collection, learn about the life of a magazine in the library, see the evolution of the book through time.

For obvious reasons of management, at the open day, scholars can see only the printed books and manuscripts, precious and rare.

The library, which was founded in the second half of the eighteenth century by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold, was housed up to 1998 in the part of Vasari’s complex that was originally the Ridotto or foyer of the Medici Theatre.

The new premises were opened on 16 December 1998 in the renovated areas previously occupied by the Biblioteca Magliabechiana.

The library, which conserves numerous manuscripts from the collections of the Florentine museums, became specialised in the art history sector to respond to the demands of study and documentation of the related museums.

The overall number of titles is 78,600. These include: 470 manuscripts, 5 incunabula, 192 sixteenth-century books, 1,445 books printed between 1601 and 1800 and 1,136 periodicals (including around 140 still on subscription).

The catalogue has been automated since 1996, within the framework of the IRIS database.

Iris is an inter-library association that comprises: the Berenson library of Villa I Tatti, the library of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, the library of the Istituto Olandese di Storia dell’Arte, the library of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the library of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and the library of the Università Internazionale dell’Arte.

As at 30 June 2003, the bibliographic records of the library entered in the IRIS database numbered 40,000. The retrospective reconversion for the remaining 23,000 titles is in progress.