Biblioteca Malatestiana

In more than 550 years, the Biblioteca Malatestiana has lost six books. One was taken by the Inquisition and two by commissioners of the French Republic. It is the only early Renaissance library that still keeps its original building, furniture and books together, and in Cesena the books still lie chained to their desks.

The reason is a decision about ownership. The friars of San Francesco started the project in 1445, but Malatesta Novello, lord of Cesena, soon stepped in. He chose the architect, Matteo Nuti, promised books worth five hundred florins, and directed that the collection belong to the commune rather than to the friars or to his family. That made it the first civic library in Europe, open to the general public, an early form of the public library as we know it. It is also why the books were not scattered. When Napoleonic rule suppressed the convent, the building became a barracks and the collection went into storage, then came back intact.

Nuti’s room, built from 1447 to 1452 and opened in 1454, follows Michelozzo’s library at San Marco in Florence. White columns divide it into three aisles, like a small basilica. The desks, 58 of them with the Malatesta arms on their ends, sit at right angles to the arched windows so that daylight falls across the page. The books rest on the sloping desktops or on a shelf beneath, each held by a chain whose ring slides along a metal rod.

Over the entrance is the family’s elephant, with its motto: the Indian elephant does not fear mosquitoes. UNESCO added the library to its Memory of the World Register in 2005.