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Among the oldest libraries in the world, one contains the oldest Italian document still in existence.
The long history of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona begins around the year 380 as a storage area for religious manuscripts and then it became a library workshop operated by local priests. The oldest dated document, known as Urcisinus Codex, reports the date of August 1, 517. The presence of a date is itself a rare feature for the time, but it allows to give the scriptorium a minimum certain age of at least 1500 years, making it the oldest library still in operation in the world. During the following centuries and throughout all the Carolingian epoch the scriptorium was very active in its document transcription and calligraphic work.
