De la bibliothèque savante à la bibliothèque publique : collections et lecteurs à Venise au XVIIIe siècle.

Between the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth the libraries played an increasing role in the urban cultural systems of the European countries. In the Italian States, particularly, the book collections’ network dating back to the sixteenth century was largely relaunched in this period. The aristocratic libraries increased in number and expanded their book holdings, following the new social aspirations and intellectual needs of the ruling classes. The libraries of the religious orders also had a revival as a part of reform projects based on scholarship. Moreover a number of State and city public libraries appeared on the scene. From the 1760s onwards, the Italian picture tended to alter rather rapidly, under pressure from the Enlightenment culture and the reforming policies of governments. In the Bourbon States of Parma and Naples and especially in the areas of Hapsburg and Lorraine reformism, namely Lombardy and Tuscany, new secular models of public institutional library were created, and projects for State intervention on the religious’ collections were carried on, allowing the creation of new professional and specialist libraries and a radical reorganisation of the existing system. In this framework, the article analyzes the Venetian case. In Venice, from about the 1680s, the library network went through an enormous expansion. The religious orders and the patrician families restructured the buildings; their book holdings were increased and re-sorted. The new collections, along with the library of the famous Venetian scholar and antiquarian Apostolo Zeno, supported the gathering momentum of the eighteenth century scholarly culture, encouraging the shaping of a book collection offered to the “common benefit” of a wide public of scholars and, more generally, of the “Republic of Letters”. Instead the State library, the Marciana, failed to establish itself as a public institution, due to the government absence in this field. Finally a radical redesign of the Venetian libraries’ system was carried out by the Napoleonic authorities from 1806 on, once the patrician collections had collapsed and the religious houses had been suppressed.