A Library rebuilt

In 1835, thanks to Antonio Bonato’s donation, Padova's Botanical Garden Library was created. From that time the volumes were organized as a public library for professors and students; it no longer seems possible to distinguish a "Marsili fund" within the book collection, which continues to grow following the development of research in the botanical garden.

Document (dated the 21st of June, 1924) authorizing the transfer of 618 volumes from the Library of the Botanical Garden to the then Library of the Institute of Pharmacology


In the 1920s, the reorganisation of the spaces and collections of the Institute of Botany initiated by the prefect Giuseppe Gola led to the division of the property and its dispatch to the University libraries, today's Science of Medicine and Geosciences, and to the Biblioteca Universitaria of Padova. In the first two libraries, the volumes form a collection of texts that are by now historical and almost fundamental to modern studies, and in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Padova, an institute dedicated to the conservation of editions, they are treated as a unitary collection, the Botanical Garden Fund. The Marsili collection is thus divided into several libraries.

A series of operations, including a cataloguing retrieval begun in the year 2000, the digitization of part of the works that belonged to Marsili and the preparation of a bibliographic exhibition at Palazzo Cavalli, as well as the realization of this same virtual exhibition, have made it possible to reconstruct, albeit virtually, the original collection of books by Giovanni Marsili. Seen all together, the more than 2000 books collected by Marsili during his life give us an image of him as a man passionate about literature and the arts and interested in all aspects of science and knowledge, an eclectic scholar of the eighteenth century.