Lamezia Terme Town Library

The collection includes mainly printed books about theology, philosophy, patrology, ecclesiastical history and exegesis, homiletics, hagiography, all dated from the 11th to the 19th century, among which it is worth mentioning some with annotations from Tommaso Campanella who studied Aristotelian logic in the village of Nicastro (now Lamezia Terme) between the years 1585 and 1587.

In addition to the printed books, the collection includes also some manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts, of Greek and Latin illuminated codices so that the total number of books reaches more than 2,500 volumes, all dated from the 16th to the 19th century and some of them printed in various Italian and European old centres of excellence of the art of typography, such as the presses of Aldus Manutius, Lucantonio Giunta, Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari, Froben and Plantin.

In order to give evidence of the importance that the singing had during the religious service for the Dominicans, the collection exhibits some liturgical books from the 18th century with an attractive red and black printing of the lyrics and accompaniment.

The two globes had been mentioned by Vito Capialbi (a famous Italian archeologist of the 19th century) in his report about Calabrian libraries as kept in the collection of another Dominican friary of Soriano Calabro and from Tommaso Campanella in his The City of the Sun.

Because of the ecclesiastical censorship, the books printed during the 16th century in the cities of Basel, Frankfurt and other suspicious places (even if they were birth places for saints or Doctors of the Church, had been inked in order to cover all of a portion of a text classified as prohibited, which is what happened to the six big volumes of the Theatrum Humanae Vitae (Basel, 1586-87) by Theodor Zwinger stored in Lamezia though thanks to this expedient, the books were not destroyed and survived up to now.