Ancient books (incunabula and cinquecentine)
The Cinquecentine Room groups all those works printed between 1501 and 1600 and obtained by Università Cattolica through acquisitions, exchanges, bequests and donations. The works, which include several first editions, total about 2.000 volumes.
The donation of the Emilio Nasalli Rocca library in 1973 enriched the University's collection of 16th-century editions with a significant number of exemplary works. An equally rich source of 16th-century works were the donations of the Pedroli (121 volumes) and Negri da Oleggio fund.
At the beginning of 2015 have been completed the reorganization and cataloging of the whole collection, making freely available the list in the UCSC OPAC:
Informations about this important project, implemented under the supervision of qualified staff of the Milan campus Library, are presented in the bulletin Tralecarte, issue 6 (in Italian).
More information is available also in articles published on CattolicaNews (in Italian):
> Le Cinquecentine vanno in Rete
> Che emozione se dalla rilegatura appare un libro più antico
> Catalogare, voce del verbo conservare
> Libri antichi e archeologia, la storia è touch
The Cinquecentine Room also conserves 39 incunabula and a fragment of the Strasburg edition of Catholicon by Giovanni Balbi. Among the Fifteenth-century works, the Pedroli donation included the De re aedificatoria by L. B. Alberti printed in Florence by Nicolò di Lorenzo Alemanno (editio princeps by Alberti).
Articles on the work of the collection (in Italian):
To consult the volumes of the collection, please contact the staff of the Giuseppe Billanovich Reference Room.