It's survived plagues, fires, invasions and bombing. Now an Australian woman is scrambling to save it once more

The Age

31-05-2025

The library is tucked away in a quiet corner of Verona's historic centre, along the Adige River. You enter a hushed hall, the air still and cool, thick with the scent of aged parchment and stone. Light filters gently through the windows, catching the edges of weathered shelves and mosaic-tiled floor. This is no ordinary library – this is a place where the modern world fades into silence and the ancient past speaks in whispers.
But behind the beauty and reverence lies a more precarious truth.
When Fasani, known to all as 'Don Bruno', was handed the responsibility of running the Capitolare in 2010, there was no ceremony, no support, no resources. 'They just gave me the keys,' he says. 'And wished me good luck!'
A journalist and Catholic priest, Fasani suddenly found himself in charge of an institution that had outlived empires – with nothing but his resolve to keep it alive.
'My only assets were goodwill and my perseverance,' he says.
Despite Verona's wealth and cultural prominence, Fasani's appeals for help went unanswered. 'I had knocked on all the doors,' he says. 'It doesn't give them [potential donors] visibility because it's not known, so they're not interested.'
But spend time with Don Bruno, and he'll draw you in too. He's as passionate about what's tucked away in the vaults and archives as he is about what's on display.
Age is not its only marvel. Today, the library has about 95,000 volumes, including more than 1200 ancient manuscripts, 270 incunabula (early printed books) and 11,000 parchments – making it a treasure trove for global scholarship.
Behind thick glass there's the Codex Veronensis, a 5th-century palimpsest that preserves the Institutes of Gaius — the sole surviving classical Roman legal text of its kind.
Nearby, richly dyed purple parchment glows faintly beneath the lights, its script rendered in silver ink, while the sacred names of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are illuminated in pure gold. Kings took their oath on this book. It now sits in a drawer.
In another cabinet, the binding of a 500-year-old Carolingian gospel is fraying, its pages thick and soft with age. There are marginalia scrawled by anonymous monks who once worked by candlelight.
You don't know where to look first. A shelf lined with 9th-century commentaries, still intact. A case of Renaissance humanist manuscripts, one page translucent with wear. A forgotten globe, dull with dust, reveals a map of Australia etched decades before Cook's voyage.
These are not just old things. They are fragments of civilisation, preserved in skin and ink. And the silence here isn't empty – it's full.
The Capitolare has survived a great deal. In 1944, as US bombs rained down on Verona, a German scholar risked his life to help then-director Monsignor Turini smuggle 52 crates of priceless manuscripts to a hidden parish in the hills. The collection was narrowly saved and much of the building flattened.
It was rebuilt, but since it has risked slipping quietly into irrelevance – lost not to fire or flood, but to indifference. The financial reality remains daunting.
'In many ways Don Bruno is still in the same situation as when he was handed the keys,' Fiorenza says. But she adds it now has access regional and national funds for works and restorations as well as the ever-increasing income support from the flow of national and international visitors and students.
'The plan is to ensure they can maximise and develop the full potential of the library to become an international cultural hub for scholars and visitors,' she says.
A handful of donors have stepped in. The Bauli Group, who brought Verona's panettone and pandoro to the world, contributed significantly to establish the library's foundation. Cartiere Saci – a European leader in the production of recycled packaging paper and where Fiorenza's husband, Cusumano Giannicola, sits on the board – also opened its coffers. Several banks have made large contributions.
These funds have allowed vital restoration works to begin and previously closed rooms to be opened to the public. But the need far exceeds the available funds.
Francesco Bongarrà, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, says the library's situation also embodies Italy's unique challenge.
'There is no doubt that the Capitolare is a treasure,' he says, 'but we don't have enough resources to keep all this fantastic stuff up and running and preserved.'
Bongarrà says the sheer volume of irreplaceable artefacts scattered across Italy, from churches to countless other libraries, means that many equally important collections are 'getting lost and not preserved properly'.
'We are at the stage where Italy itself should be treated as a museum – but no state can fund it; it will take the rest of us to,' he says.
A critical issue for the library lies in the very walls: Roman stone foundations damaged by centuries of humidity. Fixing them could cost €600,000 ($1.1 million).
But as Fiorenza explains: 'You can't go to someone and say, 'Give me €600,000 to just, you know, to fix up the Roman wall.' There needs to be a return on the brand. That's the biggest challenge that we're facing now.'
Fiorenza is now leveraging her extensive global network, connecting the Capitolare with influential figures and institutions. Fasani this month embarked on a packed tour of New York, including meetings with the head of medieval and renaissance studies at Seton Hall University, the Italian Institute of Culture, and discussions about twinning Verona with a New Jersey namesake.
Architectural plans have already been drawn up to develop the library's upper floors into a full visitor experience – including a cafe, bookstore and restaurant.
'That is the ultimate vision of what Don Bruno has drawn together,' Fiorenza says. 'I just have to find him the money.'
Technology, she believes, will be key. 'The technologies that we have today, can make it come alive,' she says. 'The goal is to bring it from the history to today.'
Fiorenza has become an unlikely figure in this rarefied world of Latin texts and spectral scans – a woman with no background in manuscript preservation who now speaks fluently about humidity levels and spectral imaging.
One of her favourite discoveries came not from a vault, but from a dusty corner: two forgotten 18th-century globes – one terrestrial, one celestial – crafted by German mathematician, astronomer and cartographer Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr and astronomer and engraver Johann Georg Puschner.
'Oh my … that's a map of Australia,' she said when she spotted it. There it was, a sketch continent with no east coast to be seen, charted decades before Cook's landing in 1770 – a detail unnoticed for generations.
The globes, set to undergo restoration, have become symbolic of the library's broader journey: overlooked, undervalued, and now gently being brought back to life.
'It's taken over my life,' Fiorenza admits with a laugh. 'But, you know, how can it not? Once you see it.'
For all the technology, for all the digital strategies and academic projects, what still moves people is the human experience. Fasani offers a quiet reminder: 'Technology and artificial intelligence shouldn't be a substitute for personal relations. You cannot replicate how it feels to look and hold this collection.'
It's a reminder that reverberates through the Capitolare itself. These books – these voices – weren't made to be archived behind glass. They were made to be read, wrestled with, loved.
As you walk out through the cloisters, the weight of what you've seen stays with you. Not because of what's been lost – but because of what's still here.
And because, against the odds, a woman from Queensland is helping the world notice it just in time.