Our History

The Titta Bernardini Private Library is located in the historical centre of Campofilone and is set up and organised with the aim of preserving and enhancing an important family heritage consisting of book collections and more. This is a choice strongly desired by the Titta Bernardini heirs who, with the support of collaborators, intend to divulge and make visible, in many forms, the richness and particularity of their collections.

The first objective that we wanted to achieve was to make the book heritage accessible in its entirety. This result was achieved thanks to the collaboration with the “Romolo Spezioli” Civic Library of Fermo, which strongly supported the entry of our library into the then Piceno Interprovincial System, now the Marche South Regional Library System, and which directed, supported and assisted the complex operation of cataloguing for online access to the unified catalogue. This choice grew out of an awareness of the importance of making the existing library collections known and valorised to avoid the dispersion and pulverisation of the cultural heritage.

Discovering ‘hidden’ riches in the Library, such as the catalogues of the Hoepli Antiquarian Bookshop, has aroused the interest of scholars and offered the opportunity to organise a bibliographic exhibition in December 2019 in the evocative Sala Boscoli of the Palazzo dei Priori in Fermo entitled ‘Viaggi di libri. Il contributo dell’antiquariato Hoepli nella prima metà del Novecento’, as well as the publication of the related catalogue. The Library is also creating a contemporary archive with digital photo-reproductions of some of the artefacts it owns, as well as a vast production of photographic images of considerable emotional impact that highlight the peculiarities of the collections in terms of both aesthetics and content.

The Library is founded on the cultural tradition of the Titta-Bernardini family, when already in the early 20th century, the well-known baritone and avid reader Titta Ruffo, began to put together his first book collections, mainly consisting of theatrical and literary texts, not forgetting art and the ideals of freedom; these are finely bound and personalised volumes, complete with ex libris. But the real ‘author’ of the library was the son of the famous singer, namely Ruffo Titta jr., who, thanks to his outstanding qualities as a man of culture and bibliophile, expanded the collections in a multidisciplinary sense, and dedicated a careful section to the history of books and related disciplines. He then availed himself of the skills and professionalism of expert librarians, and in his Roman home he set up a real library following the criteria and procedures of librarianship: from the organisation of the spaces to the compilation of the card catalogue, from indexing by subject to shelfmarking.

Then, in 2015, following its transfer from the Roman house in Campofilone, the new journey of this important heritage began, to which was added the book collection of Paolo Ruffo Bernardini, Titta Ruffo’s grandson, dedicated to the sea and other important collections.
These protagonists coined the name: Biblioteca Titta Bernardini.