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Vicenza after dark · Books & culture
A library party after closing time
Street food and a DJ set in the garden of an eighteenth century library palace
An invitation to spend a summer evening in a palace garden is an appealing prospect in Vicenza, especially when it comes from the city’s historic public library. For Night@Bertoliana, the library’s supporters bring a DJ, street food and an open bar to Palazzo Cordellina, an eighteenth century residence built in the Palladian tradition. The garden provides the setting for a party whose admission fee supports the restoration of the Bertoliana’s historic collections, giving visitors a rather sociable way to participate in the cultural life of the city.
Marcok, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Know before you go
The 2026 edition has concluded. Check the organiser’s website for any announcement of a 2027 edition before planning your visit. The party takes place in Palazzo Cordellina’s garden; attendance requires separate event registration. Event enquiries info@amicidellabertoliana.it Library switchboard +39 0444 578211
About
One of Veneto’s oldest public libraries opens the garden of an eighteenth century palace for dinner, drinks and music.
A neoclassical courtyard, frescoed rooms overhead, an open bar, and across the cobbled street, manuscripts, maps and 850 incunabula. From Piazza dei Signori, walk a few minutes towards San Lorenzo and take Contrà Riale, one of the quieter streets of the historic centre. Behind the late eighteenth century façade of Palazzo Cordellina is one of the cultural homes of the Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza’s historic public library, founded in 1708 and among the earliest public libraries in Veneto.
The palace opens onto an intimate planted courtyard garden, renewed with tall bamboo, black hornbeam, strawberry tree, Persian ironwood and oakleaf hydrangeas, with five artist designed benches among the greenery. Above are the frescoed rooms of the piano nobile, decorated in the eighteenth century by Paolo Guidolini and Girolamo Ciesa. This is an urban garden hidden inside the palazzo, not a formal Italian garden, with the architecture enclosing it almost completely from the surrounding streets.
In 2026, the association that supports the library launched Night@Bertoliana, an evening created to raise money for the conservation of its historic collections. From 7pm to 11pm the garden is reserved for street food, an open bar, cocktails and a DJ set, with the eighteenth century palace around it and central Vicenza immediately outside the gate. The first edition sold out
THE LIBRARY BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
1906. THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WROTE TO A VICENZA NOVELIST WHO HAD JUST BEEN BANNED BY THE VATICAN
In 1906, the Vatican placed Antonio Fogazzaro’s novel Il Santo on the Index of Forbidden Books. That same year, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, wrote personally to Fogazzaro in Vicenza.
The Bertoliana preserves Roosevelt’s handwritten letter, together with Fogazzaro’s manuscripts, correspondence and papers surrounding a novel that had managed to interest readers abroad and irritate Rome at exactly the same time.
THE FAMILY PAPERS THAT CAME WITH A 50 YEAR INSTRUCTION
In 1961, another part of the Fogazzaro archive arrived at the Bertoliana inside a sealed package. The family instructions were precise: do not open until 2011, the centenary of the writer’s death. The library obeyed. When the packet was finally opened in February 2011, it contained 21 notebooks, private letters to his wife and children and other family documents that had remained unread for half a century.
A MAP OF THE WORLD WITHOUT AMERICA
In 1448, more than forty years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo drew one of the most extraordinary surviving maps of the medieval world. America is absent because Europe did not yet know it was there. Jerusalem occupies the centre. East is at the top. Around the map, Leardo added an elaborate astronomical and calendrical system linking geography to the movements of the heavens. Only three world maps by Giovanni Leardo are known to survive. One is in Vicenza, at the Bertoliana.
THE BOOK THAT CHANGED HOW WE SEE THE HUMAN BODY
The Bertoliana also owns a first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, published in 1543. It is one of the landmark books in the history of medicine. Vesalius based his anatomy on direct observation of the human body, correcting centuries of errors inherited from ancient authorities, and accompanied the text with more than 200 extraordinarily sophisticated anatomical woodcuts. Medicine changed. So did the way the human body could be pictured on a printed page.
THE FRIENDS BEHIND THE NIGHT
Night@Bertoliana was created in 2026 by Amici della Bertoliana, Friends of the Bertoliana, a non profit association founded in Vicenza in 2011 to help protect and restore the historic collections of the city library. Their work is pleasingly concrete. They raise private funds for manuscripts, rare books and maps that need conservation, support digitisation, and have even created an Adopt a Book programme in which individual objects are assigned a restoration cost and donors can finance their recovery. Past projects have helped conserve everything from a 1395 illuminated Divine Comedy to manuscript maps and Renaissance books. Night@Bertoliana is the newest version of the same idea. Instead of another formal fundraising dinner, the Friends opened the garden of Palazzo Cordellina for one June evening of food, cocktails, an open bar and a DJ set. The €45 ticket contributes to the conservation of the Bertoliana’s collections. The first edition sold out.
2026
First edition, sold out
INFO
AMICI DELLA BERTOLIANA
info@amicidellabertoliana.it
BIBLIOTECA CIVICA BERTOLIANA
+39 0444 578211 consulenza.bertoliana@comune.vicenza.it