Bergamo's main library, named for cardinal Angelo Mai (1782-1854), a philologist born in Schilpario (Bergamo), was designed by the Vicenza-born architect Vittorio Scamozzi in the early 1600s and completed in the 1900s. It is located in piazza Vecchia, opposite the Palazzo della Ragione, also known as Palazzo Vecchio.
The library's collection originated with a bequest to the city by cardinal Alessandro Giuseppe Furietti (1685-1764), a prominent scholar with interests in literature, archaeology, and antiquities.
Initially housed in Palazzo Nuovo, the collection was transferred to the Cathedral rectory in 1797, and then to Palazzo della Ragione in 1843. In 1928, it was returned to the original location which is now entirely occupied by the library, whose collection has continued to expand thanks to donations and acquisitions.
Today, the Civic Library's collection consists of 700,000 books, 11,000 periodicals, over 2,000 incunabula (the first printed books of the 15th century), and 12,000 16th-century books. The Tassiana Hall houses two important globes—terrestrial and celestial—made by Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1650-1718) for the Convent of Sant'Agostino in Bergamo.
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