Royal Library Of Turin

The Royal Library of Turin (Biblioteca Reale di Torino) is located under the porticoes on the ground floor of the Royal Palace (today a World Heritage Site) in the north-west Italian city of Turin. At the time of the library’s foundation around 1840, Turin was the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the library was fitted out by Pelagio Palagi on the initiative of the King of Sardinia Carlo Alberto in order to hold the rare manuscripts that had been collected by the House of Savoy for many years. The king also increased the collection by 2000 drawings by famous artists, including Leonardo da Vinci. In 1893, during the reign of Umberto I of Savoy as King of Italy, the collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings was added to by a Russian collector who donated Codex on the Flight of Birds. Further works by Leonardo held by the library include his well-known self-portrait, his study for the angel in the first version of his Virgin of the Rocks, and his study for the angel in Verrocchio's The Baptism of Christ.

 The ceiling is gorgeous....

 Love the little upper level along the whole library....

The collection is quite exquisite....

 And this man has been watching the library silently....

CDP September Theme - Library

This is the public library of Turin, in piazza Carlo Alberto, cool architeture, but the system they employed isn't so user friendly, basically, there is no way to navigate through the bookselves to llok for a book, instead you have to look through the catalogue, write down the number of the book of your interest and go to ask for the book from the service counter.

This is the university library at via Po, more user friendly, very much less glamouur.....

Finally, just want to mention this, in Italian language, library is biblioteca and bookshop is libraria, this caused some confusion for me when I had just arrived in Italy.

This is a biblioteca, a public library.....

These are librerie, bookshops....

This post is for the CDP September Theme, please click here to view the other entries...

I will be away for 2 weeks, so the posting will stop until I am back to Italy.

Biblioteca civica Italo Calvino

Biblioteca civica Italo Calvino is a City Library Turin. It belongs to the city library system and is dedicated to Italo Calvino.

The building is located in the area between Borgo Dora and Balôn. The area, already occupied by Molassi (the most important grain mills of the city of medieval origin), in the seventeenth century started the emergence of several tanneries, silk mills and factories. The initial process of urbanization and industrialization went and had a further increase after a century later, from the reign of Victor Amadeus III of Savoy.