Library

The Reading Room of the Library will be closed to the public from 1 August up to and including 2 September

Mission

The Library of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation manages the book heritage, as well as a newspaper library of historical and current material. It serves both the internal and external public.

In all likelihood, the original core of the Library is due to the initiative of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, who took a personal interest in the arrangement of a collection of approximately 9,000 volumes, which included historical, legal and literary works belonging to the Royal Cabinet of the Kings of Sardinia.

Later the initial holdings were expanded with the addition of important bequests of historical and political works; collections of treaties and conventions from all the countries of the world; works of geography, statistics and international law, together with the very rich collection of diplomatic documents, making it the most important specialist library in the Kingdom of Italy.

With the transfer of the capital to Rome, the Library followed the same fate as the Ministry and was later housed in the Palazzo della Consulta, Palazzo Chigi and in the premises of Rome’s Governorate, where it remained until 1958, when the Foreign Ministry was definitively moved to the Palazzo della Farnesina.

Holdings

The heritage available for online consultation is visible at the following address. Further bibliographic searches can be carried out at the other research services listed on the dedicated page.

Through subsequent acquisitions and deposits, the book heritage has progressively been enriched until reaching almost 200,000 current volumes, to which the 1,500 periodicals including Italian and foreign magazines from different periods must be added.
The Library also has some important book collections which, due to their systematic nature and the high historical and artistic value of the volumes, are independently catalogued. Their consultation is subject to particular constraints, in order to preserve their integrity.

• “Fondo Antico”

Consisting of a core of about 3,000 works published between 1500 and 1830 that are currently being identified and catalogued, it is the Library’s most valuable section. A conspicuous part of these volumes consists of precious and rare books published in the 16^th century (the so-called cinquecentine) on various subjects, but there are also many volumes published in the 17th and 18th centuries concerning, inter alia, international conventions and travel literature.
The first editions of Dei delitti e delle pene by Cesare Beccaria and the Codex juris gentium et diplomaticus by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz also deserve special mention.

• “Fondo Armao”
Donated to the Library byAmbassador Ermanno Armao (1887-1976), it consists of 252 volumes published between 1544 and 1950. It includes valuable historical and geographical works from the 17th and 18th centuries, numerous works on history and politics concerning Europe and the Mediterranean countries, and an important corpus of volumes devoted to the history of Venice. The main works include those linked to the name of the great Venetian geographer and cosmographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli. These include the Atlante Veneto, the Isolario, the Corso geografico and the volumes of the Biblioteca universale sacro-profana.

• “Fondo Asiatico”
Donated byAmbassador Gerardo Zampaglione (1917-1996), it comprises about 1,000 volumes, mainly published in the period between 1850 and 1990, concerning India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Arab world. In particular, there are around 600 volumes on Indian culture, history and literature.

• “Fondo Eritrea”
It is a book heritage from the Italian library in Asmara and includes material of exceptional historical-documentary value, in particular newspapers and daily newspapers, published under the various administrations that succeeded one another in Eritrea, as well as numerous official publications (1892-1941) of the colonial government.

• Diplomatic documents

One of the special features of the Library are the collections of foreign and Italian diplomatic documents. Particularly valuable among these are the so-called libri di colore, i.e.  collections of diplomatic documents published to document the foreign policy of a particular country and which fulfilled, in essence, the function of today’s public diplomacy. Among others, the collections of the Italian Green Books (1858 -1923), the English Blue Books (1815-1882) and the French Yellow Books (1850-1939) are preserved.

The entire collection of I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani is also present. The volumes, divided into 12 series, historically document the development of Italy’s foreign policy.

• Periodicals

An area of the Library is the periodicals library, which collects and preserves specialist magazines of a historical, political, legal and diplomatic nature, both in Italian and in foreign languages.