“I have two rooms full of books and I have not read all of them yet, but I study from them every day. There is no book on earth that I do not have …”
So said Benedict, the Prior of St. Michael to the representatives of the great Benedictine abbeys of Europe gathered in council at Limoges in 1031.
These words are the oldest evidence of the wide and well-stocked abbey library that disappeared after the abolition of 1622, probably dispersed all over the world.
The current library was set up only from October 1836, with the arrival of the Rosminian Fathers on Mount Pirchiriano.
Rosmini himself sent a letter from Stresa with the list of books to buy, two days after the arrival of the first religious. The library contained about 300 volumes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, over time, an important wealth of texts was gathered, up to the current number of about 10,000 volumes all reordered and filed by the patient and constant work of a group of volunteers, following the system of the Vatican Library.
