Eight Things You Might Not Know About the Library

Distances. Walking on the 455,000 volumes of the Library, you could get from Milan to Magenta without setting foot on the ground: there are 20 kilometers of shelving that house them. Incidentally, only 13% of the total books are on display in the reading rooms.

Petrarch. Among the 98 16th-century volumes kept safely in storage by the Library, there are two with works by the poet Francesco Petrarca.

Handwritten. In the Bocconi warehouses you can also find the lecture notes of the first Bocconi professors. The peculiarity is that it was the students themselves who took them, transcribing by hand the words of their instructors during the lesson.

Neruda. Back when Bocconi had a Language Department, poets of the caliber of Pablo Neruda and Miguel Angel Asturias also gave lessons. Many of the transcripts of these lectures are kept in in the institution's warehouses.

Pound. At the end of the 1930s, the writer Ezra Pound also gave a series of lectures. He was invited by Angelo Sraffa – who appreciated his work despite their political differences. The titles of the lectures are preserved in the Library's archives, and the full text is presumed to have been published in Pound's book ABC of Economics.

The pelican. The Library is responsible for reconstructing the significance of the pelican for Bocconi University. On the tabernacle of the church commissioned by Donna Javotte to celebrate the founder of the university, there is an image of a pelican injuring itself trying to extinguish with its blood the flames that were threatening the nest with its young. Interpreted as a symbol of paternal love, it was taken up by Ferdinando Bocconi in the 20th century in memory of his son who died prematurely and included in the family coat of arms. The pelican runs through the entire history of the university, from 1906 when the alumni used it as the symbol of their association, to the moment when it was included in the Bocconi crest, to when it represented the Student Guides in the '90s and the editorial series for the Egea lecture notes, "The Pelican's Notes." Finally, it became the mascot of the University's sports teams, preserving and handing down that original sense of "family and youth community."

In extremis. The letters and documents that make up the most important collection of the Bocconi archives, the Saminiati-Pazzi collection, were saved at the last minute from destruction in Florence. It is thanks to the archivist Davide Groppi, a Bocconi alumnus, that it is an accessible and orderly collection.

Old and new. Compared to other similar university institutions, the Bocconi Library brings together more old documents and volumes, as well as microdata and digital sources. In 2023 alone, there were 1.9 million accesses to hosted databases and over 781,000 ebooks downloaded by users.