The Biblioteca Ambrosiana, founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo on 7 September 1607 and inaugurated on 8 December 1609, was one of the first libraries to allow access to anyone who could read and write.
It was conceived by its founder as a centre of study and culture: he wanted other institutions to flourish there, such as the Collegio dei Dottori (1604), the Pinacoteca (1618) and the Accademia del Disegno (1620).
It contains more than a million printed books (including thousands of incunabula and sixteenth-century editions), almost forty thousand manuscripts (including the famous Codex Atlanticus and some of the most important manuscripts in the world) in Italian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic and Chinese (and many other languages), Chinese (and many other languages), twelve thousand drawings (by Raphael, Pisanello, Leonardo and other famous masters), twenty-two thousand engravings and other rarities (ancient maps, musical manuscripts, parchments and papyri), the library is one of the most important in the world.