THE SEMINARY LIBRARY OF MONTEFIASCONE

Montefiascone is a small town perched on the highest point of an extinct volcano whose crater is now filled with the Lake of Bolsena. It is a landmark, visible for miles around. The ancient Romans called it Mons Falisci, but the name goes back yet further to the Etruscans, whose heartland lay between present day Rome and Florence. In the middle ages it marked the northern limit of papal territory, and the remains of a great castle mark its importance as a frontier town. When the seat of the papacy moved to Avignon in the fourteenth century, Montefiascone became an important stopping-place on the road from there to Rome.

But from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century all the land round became the private fief of the Farnese family, whose most famous member was Pope Paul III. In 1649 Innocent X re-annexed the territory, and in 1686 Marcantonio Barbarigo, a member of a famous patrician family of Venice, was elected Cardinal and appointed Bishop of Montefiascone and Corneto (now Tarquinia). He was determined to repair the neglect of his predecessors, and built a large seminary to educate the priests who might minister to the needs of his diocese. This building still stands at the top of the town, near the old castle.

An important feature of the seminary was its library, for which Barbarigo built a handsome long room with a vaulted ceiling and walls painted in trompe l’oeil. Part of its decoration still survives, although the present shelves, in handsome dark wood cases, are of later date. An arched window overlooks the town, with a wrought iron balcony incorporating the Barbarigo arms. The earliest inventory of the contents of the library, drawn up in 1692-3, contains almost 300 books, many of which are still there. At some point before his death in 1706 the Bishop added books, some going back to the fifteenth century, that had belonged to his Venetian ancestors, one of whom, Pierfrancesco Barbarigo, had been the principal investor in the famous Aldine press.

Besides this ‘foundation’ collection, books came from other libraries, among them the monastery founded by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese on the Isola Bisentina, one of two islands on the lake of Bolsena, about 1600. The learned Cardinal Garampi added more books in the eighteenth century, including books in Hebrew and other oriental languages, among them a copy of the great Walton polyglot bible. The Napoleonic invasion of Italy brought damage and loss to the library, in part put right by his successor Jean Siffrein Maury. Among the books now added were some from German monasteries suppressed about 1800. Where the library had previously contained theology and works on canon law, books of secular learning and education were now added, including scientific and geographical works.

A gateway tower adjoins the seminary church, also built by Barbarigo, and on its other side is a doorway with the legend ‘Typographia Seminarii’ over it. This was the site of a printing press that was part of the Seminary until World War II, when the Seminary again suffered (one of the books used as a shutter still has machine-gun bullets in it). In recent times, the Library has benefited from the annual conservation course, through which many of the books have been restored and a modern catalogue undertaken. The Library can now look forward to a future of continued scholarly use.