In the fifth century it was one of the few important cities of the Western Empire, the favourite residence of the Ostrogoth King Theodoric the Great, with a basilica whose grandeur can be reconstructed in imagination from the large surviving areas of mosaic pavement and the fragments (discovered in 1945) in the form of the Chi Rho (XP) monogram of the many bronze lamps that lit the interior.

'[2] Literary texts - histories in particular, but also the Younger Pliny's Letters and the poems of Tibullus and Catullus, the latter a native of Verona - entered the library at an early date and must have presented later scribes, especially in the seventh and eighth centuries when vellum was scarce and precious, with a constant temptation to wash off' the earlier writing and re-use the material.

In the eighth century, probably under Bishop Egino, a German from the abbey of Reichenau, new copies in pre-caroline minuscule were made of some uncial manuscripts; Claudian's poems and the anonymous collections of maxims known as the Distichs of Cato, still in the Capitolare, and Livy's Ab urbe condita, now lost.

In the early years of the ninth century, a time of relative peace and prosperity under Charlemagne's son, Pepin of Italy, the scriptorium was directed by one of those exceptionally able and energetic men whose careers have often been decisive in the transmission of a text or the history of a library, the Archdeacon Pacificus.

He evidently felt a deep loyalty to the schola sacerdotum, the corporation of cathedral clergy of which he was ex officio joint head, and obtained from the bishop a grant of property to pay their salaries as well as exemption from episcopal jurisdiction for the canons.

Founder or restorer of seven churches: expert worker in gold, silver and other metals, marble and all kinds of wood: author of a commentary on the Old and New Testaments, and of 'many other writings' (among them a manual on the computus and a topographical glossary of Verona); inventor of a night clock and of a poem attached to it (the latter has been tentatively identified: in two manuscripts it is illustrated by a drawing of an instrument shaped like a telescope, no doubt designed to tell the time from the position of the stars).

Bis centenos terque senos codicesque fecerat - he 'made' two hundred and eighteen manuscripts: the epitaph's claim, formerly regarded as poetic exaggeration, is now accepted as an exact statement of the scriptorium's output under Pacificus.

Other aspects of his intellectual interests are revealed in an enquiry by a canon of the cathedral, forwarded by Pacificus to a German monk in a Brescian monastery, whether at the Day of Judgement Adam would be among the saved; and in a rather forced comparison of his own composition between the seven grades of the priesthood and episodes in the life of Jesus (e.g. '[Christ] was a lector when he opened the book of the Prophet Isaiah').

His favourite light reading, to judge from the frequency of his notes, was the early Christian 'novel', the Clementine Recognitions, whose protagonists are Saint Peter, Clement, the first Pope, and Simon Magus; its stories from Greek mythology, intended to illustrate the immorality of the pagan pantheon, have been attentively studied.

A Fleming, appointed bishop of Verona in 931 by Hugo of Provence, King of Italy, Ratherius was delighted by the standard of learning in his see, 'another Athens for the multitude of its wise men', and numerous annotations show that he read his way carefully through the library.

[5] Petrarch himself first visited Verona in 1345, a fugitive from an outbreak of local warfare in Lombardy, and was overjoyed to find in the cathedral, and copy, Cicero's letters to Atticus, Brutus and Quintus, on which he modelled his own style in correspondence.

Other volumes passed into the possession of the victorious Visconti rulers of Milan and were eventually removed to Blois by King Louis XII of France with the rest of the Milanese ducal library from the castle of Pavia.

On 16 May 1797, 'the luckless day' in the words of a former librarian, the French commissioners, in pursuance of the national policy of removing Italian works of art to Paris, appropriated thirty manuscripts and fourteen incunables, not all of which were recovered after Waterloo.