The Library
Tappa

The Library

A treasure of ancient texts

The library is the historical archive, on the fifth and final floor of the buildings. It is set in a comfortable room with a view of the port, with a huge documentary heritage, partly kept in vintage bookcases. These rooms contains 2,200 antique texts, ranging from Latin classics from the sixteenth-seventeenth century to the precious works from the Illuminist eara, including the Livorno edition of the Encyclopedie di D’Alembert e Diderot (14, see further details) and the Gazzettiere Americano (15, see further details); there are also about 40 thousand volumes, monographs and journals, and about 16 thousand archive units, that bear witness to the growth of the city and its economic activities from the end of the eighteenth century onwards.  Looking at trademarks, headed paper, brochures and advertising magazines, for example, it is possible to retrace the life of companies before and after the Unification of Italy, to discover their organisational and production characteristics: from pasta and candied fruit factories to alcohol distilleries, from the production of candles and soap to building sites and mechanical workshops, from the processing of glass, rags and coral, to printing works... 

The archive also holds several documents about the port and commercial traffic, maritime transport statistics, brochures from sailing companies that sailed from Livorno, as well as posters and brochures from World War I and a section of more than 5000 photographs from the 1950s onwards, that illustrate port life, the city's urban development, agricultural fairs and craft exhibitions, conferences and institutional visits.