Biblioteca Teresiana

Mantua's city library is the place where it is possible to browse through books, also in a digital format online (http://digilib.bibliotecateresiana.it/), a number of very valuable works from various periods and often also splendidly illustrated. The library is known as the Teresiana, after the empress Maria Theresa of Austria who founded it. The library is housed in the large building designed in the sixteenth century by the Gesuits, who carried out their activities here. The destiny of the building was to immediately become a place of learning: in fact in 1625 the Duke Ferdinand inaugurated here a “universal studio”, and the faculty of philosophy and theology was directed by the Gesuits. This marked the birth of the “Palace of Study”, an open factory that grew in the course of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Palace was inaugurated in 1763, at a time when Austria had already annexed the dukedom.