The book collection of the Library of the University for Foreigners of Perugia began with the founding of the University itself in 1926, finding an appropriate location in 1927 in Palazzo Gallenga, built between 1740 and 1758 on the site of the houses of Marquis Girolamo Antinori.
To an initial core of volumes serving the teaching and academic needs of language and high culture courses, donations from private individuals, publishing houses, and institutions, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Embassy in Rome, were added.
Among the most important bequests, special mention should be made of the substantial and valuable collection donated by notarial act in 1931 by Senator Count Romeo Adriano Gallenga, comprised of the noble family’s collection, which came to be known as the “Gallenga Stuart Schunk Collection.” The collection, which began with works belonging to the donor’s great-grandfather Martino Schunk of Manchester, was enriched by those owned by his highly cultured mother Mary Montgomery Stuart, his uncle Roberto Stuart, and his maternal grandfather Giacomo Stuart, not to mention works from the paternal branch’s collection. The collection was acquired by the University upon the death of Romeo Adriano in 1938. In 1939, the library already contained 15,000 volumes, to which the Gallenga Collection and other collections were added, among which should be mentioned the musicologist Riccardo Schnabl-Rossi’s collection, with about 800 volumes, and the collection donated by Professor Umberto Pittola, with about 2,500 works.
The events of the Second World War intersected with the history of the Library, which was occupied by the Nazi armed forces until June 1944, and immediately after, by the Army School of Education of the Allied Forces Command until 1946. It was Aldo Capitini who led the University through the postwar period and entrusted the care of the book collection to Giovanni Cecchini. It was the latter who, in a 1950 report, lamented the scarcity of funds for enriching the Library's collections, which then comprised about 25,600 volumes and occupied five rooms of different sizes in Palazzo Gallenga. In the following years, the Library of the University for Foreigners received encyclopedias, vocabularies and dictionaries, reference volumes, local literature and history, precious volumes dedicated to Umbrian art, general historical, artistic, and literary works—above all, modern literature and the flourishing Italian literature, which would be joined by the indispensable works of the Greek and Latin classics. However, it was in the 1990s, with the introduction first of university diploma courses and then degree courses, that a broadening of acquisitions to meet the educational, research, and study needs of the new academic programs took place.
Starting in the mid-1990s, with the creation of departmental libraries, the so-called “Library of the University for Foreigners” changed its name to the Central Library, though certainly not its spirit of serving the activities of the University.
In 2008, the storage rooms, offices, and reading rooms were relocated to the Valittutti Building in the Santa Margherita park. However, for legal and logistical reasons, the aforementioned collections and closed periodicals remained housed in Palazzo Gallenga. In the same year, the Library received the collection of the late Alfonso Costanza, a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, made up mostly of books in Chinese, but also Japanese, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, totaling about 1,194 volumes currently being inventoried and catalogued.
The Library currently brings together the book collections of the two former Department libraries and the Center for Bibliographic Orientation and Documentation, becoming a single structure with the aim of providing adequate service to the needs of its users.
Gustavo R. Rella Central Library of the University for Foreigners of Perugia