PREFACE.

indicated at the ends of books; in extracting and restoring to their rightful authors those pieces that lay hidden among the writings and collections of others—such as short works, letters, charters, and other items of that sort. These had to be selected from here and there and fixed under their own names, with the books and pages where they are found indicated. Not to mention the further labor of arranging a second Catalog constructed according to the classes of sciences and arts, where the entire Library had to be reorganized once again by a new method, so that the previous alphabetical Catalog might become, if not more useful, at least less useless. The author suggests that an alphabetical list alone is insufficient for a scholar; a subject-based catalog is necessary to make the collection truly functional.

But indeed, a few words must be prefaced here about this same Library—not for the Italians, to whom it is very well known, but for foreigners, if there are any, who are unaware of its true excellence and scale. Surely it is not unknown to the most noble and learned men from almost all of Europe, who, arriving in the City original: "Urbem" — referring to Rome for the sake of travel, as is customary, have been wont to grace it with their frequent presence. For it is common knowledge that it has always been open to learned men in the upper part of the residence of its Most Eminent Owner, in the Square named after the Column of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus The Piazza Colonna in Rome, where the Imperiali family palace was located. There, according to the capacity and layout of the place, it is divided into three parts or rooms, quite differently than it appears distributed below in the Catalog of sciences. For in this catalog, the physical location or the order of the books on the shelves is not considered; instead, it was necessary to organize the entire Library into a new kind of system—a system that would be difficult to maintain even if the Library were moved to some larger and more convenient location.

The first room, then, contains the Holy Bibles with Prefaces, Concordances, and Commentaries by Catholic interpreters; the Holy Fathers and Greek and Latin ecclesiastical writers; the Councils; dogmatic and polemical theologians; church historians, hagiographers hagiologos: writers of the lives of saints, liturgical books, and rituals. Likewise, it contains secular historians, antiquarians, poets, and philologists philologos: scholars of language and literature.

The second room comprises Canon and Civil Law; scholastic and moral theologians; ascetic and homiletic concionatorios: books of sermons or relating to preaching works; and the constitutions of secular and regular “Regular” refers to religious orders that follow a specific Rule, such as the Benedictines or Franciscans orders,