Book culture

Verona has something to boast about. The oldest library in the world still in use. It has been working for, hard to believe, 1500 years!

The monks of the Cathedral had been copying books officially since 517. The result of their work is thousands of valuable books and manuscripts preserved for us, including rare books of the early period of European printing – incunabula. The only original of ancient Roman law, which dates back to the time of the Roman Emperor Caracalla, is still visible here. You can also see manuscripts with miniatures and a Bible written not in ink, but in gold and silver.

You can touch different parchments with your hand – from the softest and most transparent to the toughest. The pages of the manuscripts are made of animal skin, so one book weighs 8 kilograms, and in those days it cost  as much as a house.

At the end of the tour, you will see hand-print presses in a tipografy of 1750, old matrices and one of the first linotypes, still used today.

http://www.bibliotecacapitolare.it