For two and a half centuries from 1239, when a Malatesta was made Podestà of Rimini, the family ruled parts of the territory on either side of the River Rubicon in northern Italy where the Apennine Mountains meet the Adriatic Sea.

In 1445, at a period when many religious houses in northern Europe as well as Italy felt the need for a room to hold their books, the friars decided to build a library and were authorised by a papal bull of that year to pay the cost from a charitable bequest intended by the benefactor for other uses.

He certainly chose the architect, Matteo Nuti, who had worked for the Malatesta in Fano and Rimini, and his promise to give the library books worth five hundred florins is recorded in a second papal bull of 1450.

The light (now partly obscured by new buildings) enters by a rosace in the end wall and a line of arched windows on either side, falling conveniently at right angles to the reader's position.

The aula has the layout of a basilica (reflecting the importance of the library as a "temple of culture"), with three naves divided by ten rows of white columns made from local stone; there are eleven bays in each aisle, which are pole vaulted.

Besides a splendid thirteenth-century Bible in four volumes and a group of handsomely-illuminated law-books bequeathed by a certain Fredolo Fantini of Cesena, all produced in Bologna, they included several biblical commentaries of north French origin and philosophical works probably acquired by Italian students or professors in Paris.

Malatesta Novello bought also many late medieval Latin manuscripts, including a Boethius of about 1400 with illumination by Michelino da Besozzo and an handsome Parisian fourteenth-century Bible.

[7] The library was expanded even further thanks to personal donations by renown scholars: in 1474 it received the books of Giovanni di Marco of Rimini, who had been doctor to Pope Sixtus IV and to both the Malatesta brothers.

[8] It is uncertain whether Giovanni di Marco owned the oldest manuscript in the collection, a copy of Isidore's Etymologiae written in the Verona scriptorium in the ninth century, annotated by Ratherius and doubtless abstracted from the cathedral library after the fall of the Scaligers.

[11] Today the library has over 400,000 books, including over 340 codices covering various fields such as religion, Greek and Latin classics, sciences and medicine, and about 3,200 manuscripts from the 16th century.