Collections
The library contains around 360,000 titles, including almost 1,000 current journals, all of which are accessible to members of the library in their entirety and most of which are also available to visitors through systematic open access, as well as our rapidly growing digital resources. The annual increase amounts to approximately 6,500 titles. Thematically, the field includes source and research literature on art and cultural history from antiquity to the present day as well as selected literature from relevant neighboring disciplines. In response to the interests of researchers, the initial focus on central and southern Italy has expanded in recent years to include the Mediterranean region culturally linked to Italy and, in some cases, now extends beyond this region. The increasingly broad spectrum of research represented at the library is supported by targeted acquisitions, which either build on completed projects, thus giving them an “intellectual afterlife” or establish new focal points as required; one prominent example is the new, constantly expanding collection of source and research literature on Italian colonial history. The important collection of old and rare books, especially on Rome and travel literature, is being always enlarged and continually digitized. Together with the Weddigen department, the library is involved in the digitization and archiving of contemporary artists' estates.
The Bibliotheca Hertziana owns the world’s leading collection of guides to Rome – a collection that documents how the city and the perception of it have changed over the centuries.Ludwig Schudt (1893–1961), the Hertziana’s first library director, systematically expanded the collection of guide literature and made other scholars aware of this collection by publishing in 1930 his standard bibliographical work Le Guide di Roma.
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The Bibliotheca Hertziana has one of the best collections of travel literature. Travel literature refers to published diaries, correspondence, and memoirs, which may consist of pure text with or without illustrations, but may also consist of purely illustrated volumes: Ancient sites, natural wonders, city vedutas as well as customs and traditions stand side by side here .
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Italy’s colonial projects spanned the period of the late Kingdom and Fascism and was primarily aimed at North and East Africa (Italian East Africa from 1882 and Italian Libya from 1911). The material acquired in recent years documents the intertwining of economic, political, scientific, ethnographic, and not least touristic interests that motivated Italy’s colonial ambitions. The targeted use of photography and the increasingly futuristic aesthetics of the print products also give them value in terms of media history.
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Literature on architectural theory and the topography of Rome has been a focal point of the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s collection since its foundation. Interest initially focused on the great treatise editions of the 15th and 16th centuries, such as Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, which were systematically supplemented over the decades by publications from the following centuries.
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The Venetian-born engraver, archaeologist, architect and architectural theorist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–
1778) lived and worked in Rome from 1740. Impressed by the monumentality of the ruins, he created his first work of city views, Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, in 1743, followed by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna in 1745.
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Descriptions of disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods) are both an independent literary genre while also forming part of chronicles, city descriptions, and natural history works. Vesuvius and its eruptions in particular are the subject of numerous publications, some of them illustrated and often devoted to the geological and scientific aspects of this recurring spectacle.
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The collection focuses on works of botany, zoology and the history of technology, whose illustrations are indispensable for understanding the development of the respective scientific discipline. [They are not arranged as a group, but can be found in different parts of the classification, but mostly under Zx, a section in which scientific publications have their place.
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Atlases are by no means the only printed works in which we encounter cartographic and topographical material. Descriptions of countries and cities, travelogues, and historical works may also contain such material. The Rara holdings also include several publications whose texts and illustrations are devoted to shipping, shipbuilding, hydraulics, and related technologies.
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Francesco Vincitorio (1921–1992) worked as a journalist and art critic after studying art. In 1968 he founded the magazine NAC, Notiziario Arte Contemporanea (1974–1985), and worked for L'Espresso, as well as being involved in the organization of exhibitions. Before his death, he donated his personal library of around 15,000 art volumes to the Bibliotheca Hertziana.
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The archive of the artist Mauro Staccioli (1937–2018) is the subject of a digitization project carried out by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for the History of Art, particularly its Digital Humanities Lab, the digitization unit of the library and its Photographic Collection in collaboration with the Mauro Staccioli Archive
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Pablo Echaurren, born in Rome in 1951, was one of the protagonists of the counterculture. His works from the 1970s, in particular his watercolors, notebooks, drawings and photographs, together with an extensive collection of material - including fanzines, posters, leaflets, magazines - that the artist has kept from those years, represent the most important archive of documents of political-artistic creation after 68, a key decade in the history of contemporary Italy.
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