The following post is written by Dante Figueroa, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Law Library of Congress.
The Italian Parliamentary Library is composed of two libraries: the Senate Library and the Chamber of Deputies Library. Together they make up the Italian Joint Parliamentary Library (Polo Bibliotecario Parlamentare), the largest parliamentary library in Europe.
The Senate Library (also called the “Giovanni Spadolini” Library) was founded in 1848 in Turin. Since 2003, the Senate Library has been housed in a building looking on to Piazza della Minerva, just behind the Pantheon. The Library’s role is to provide support to the Senate but is also accessible to the general public. It holds about “700,000 modern and contemporary books, pamphlets and other printed documents, 80 incunabula, 2,000 editions from the 16th century, 8,000 maps, 850 manuscripts, and 2,000 autograph items.” The Library also holds 3,500 periodical titles (Italian and foreign), 400 newspapers (Italian and foreign), and the “holdings of the Statutes of Italian Comuni and other bodies, from the late Middle Ages until modern time.”
