The Library is named after the Augustinian bishop Angelo Rocca (1546-1620), a learned writer and passionate collector of fine editions, who was in charge of the Vatican Printing House during the pontificate of Sixtus V, who entrusted his book collection (about 20,000 volumes) to the friars of the monastery of St. Augustine in Rome in the last years of the 16th century.
Over the previous centuries the library had been enriched with valuable manuscripts, gifts from Roman nobles, or transcribed or owned by the friars themselves, who, upon their death, bequeathed them to the monastery. Angelo Rocca gave the new library a suitable home, its own annuities, its own regulations, and wanted it to be open to all, without limits of status or census.The absolute novelty of the institution desired by Rocca aroused the interest of an ever-growing public, and the library’s fame soon spread among scholars.
In 1661 Lukas Holste (1596-1661), custodian of the Vatican Library, left his valuable collection of printed volumes (about 3,000) to the Augustinian friars.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Roman convent and its library served as a backdrop for the religious controversies of the time: in Angelica are editions of forbidden texts that are still fundamental to studies and research on the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
The Library had obtained special permission to possess forbidden books, and it was this exemption from censorship that allowed it to preserve the approximately 600 volumes of the library of Augustinian Bishop Enrico Noris (1631-1704).
From 1735 to 1747 Gianlorenzo Berti (1696-1766), also linked to Roman Jansenist circles, worked in Angelica but who, as a result of the controversy surrounding his writings, preferred to leave Rome in 1748 to accept the chair of ecclesiastical history at the University of Pisa.
On these assumptions, in 1762, the very rich library of Cardinal Domenico Passionei (1682-1761) was purchased, which doubled the Angelica’s patrimony and especially enriched it with the texts that that cardinal, linked to Roman Jansenist circles, had researched and purchased on his travels as papal envoy to the countries of Protestant Europe. In those same years the friars commissioned the architect Luigi Vanvitelli to renovate the convent, and he finished the construction of the present hall in 1765. The library, which had been closed for work since 1748, was not reopened to the public until 1786, when the catalog of printed works was completed.
In the 19th century, the history of the Angelica was punctuated by the historical events affecting the city of Rome: from the invasion of the French to the proclamation of Mazzini’s republic in 1849. The vicissitudes of the Augustinians in Angelica came to an end in 1873, with the transfer of the library to the Italian state. The first decades of the Angelica’s lay management were marked by important acquisitions that greatly increased its library holdings: these included a part of the library that had belonged to the Princes Maximus (1884), 200 manuscripts and 450 printed volumes, and an important collection of works edited by Giambattista Bodoni (1919), which was added to the Bodonian editions already owned by the library. In the late 1800s, the library was enriched with a curious collection of 1930 opera librettos from the 18th and 19th centuries from Minister Santangelo.
Since 1940 it has been storing about 10,000 volumes owned by theArcadia Literary Academy.
Since 1975, the Angelica Library, has been under the Ministry of Culture. In the same year, the library of literary critic Arnaldo Bocelli, which includes texts of 20th-century Italian literature, was purchased. In 2005, the Cardone Fund was received as a gift: 800 volumes of French and Italian literature from the last years of the 19th century. In 2009, Professor Achille Tartaro‘s book collection was acquired as a gift: it consists of 1,200 works largely of literary criticism.
Bibliography:
Paola Munafò and Nicoletta Muratore, Bibliotheca Angelica Publicae commoditati dicata, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Rome 2004
Mission
Between 1600 and 1605 the idea matured in Augustinian bishop Angelo Rocca to leave his library, which was already known by the name of Angelica, for “public benefit,” and in 1604 two plaques, possibly dictated by Cursio-friend and Rocca’s first biographer-were placed on either side of the front door.
Friar Angelo Rocca of Camerino, a son of the Order of the Hermit Friars of St. Augustine, and Prefect of the Apostolic Shrine, gives, dedicates, donates (his) Library, richest in every kind of arts and sciences, and adorned with images of illustrious men represented in life, and collected over a long space of time with great labor and expenditure of money, to the Convent of St. Augustine of the City, not only for the benefit of the religious, but also of the clerics and laymen, to make manifest to the living and to posterity the devotion of the grateful soul to the Augustinian family, its mother and nurturer, and the favor to the learned and lovers of letters, in the year of salvation 1604.
(Virgil Moors op.cit.p.217, shows the change made by Rocca, after his appointment as bishop of Tagaste in 1605 to the date of the plaque).
(Virgil Mori op. cit. p.217, demonstrates the change Rocca made to the date of the plaque after his appointment as bishop of Tagaste in 1605).
Angelica Library. It is hereby ordered that no one shall dare to take away, subtract or transport to another place, not even for the convenience of study, this Library or any part thereof, or any book or any other
thing contained in the Pontifical Diploma. Those who do otherwise will be immediately liable to the penalty of excommunication, and can be absolved only by the Supreme Pontiff. Whoever then dares to sell this Library, or a small part of it, or to alienate it for any reason from this House, let him know that, in addition to the penalty of excommunication “latae sententiae,” the same Library in its entirety, with all the things pertaining to it, will be immediately assigned to the Apostolic Chamber for the Vatican Library.
Bibliography:
Virgil Mori, Biographical essay on the bibliographer Bishop Angelo Rocca (1545-1620), “Archivi,” 16, 1959, p.200-222.
Paola Munafò and Nicoletta Muratore, Bibliotheca Angelica Publicae commoditati dicata, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Rome 2004