Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries

Whether it's a paneled monastery library, the reading room of an esteemed university, a bookmobile pulled by camels at the Kenyan-Somali border, the famous private library of the Medici, or one's own private library that reflects their biography, book collections and libraries are places of comfort, oases of silence, and yet overflowing with ideas, possibilities, histories, alternative ways of life, and undiscovered things. They provide space for focused work, modern humanities, and analytical thinking, while also serving as places of contemplation, dreaming, and remembering. In this photo expedition, Massimo Listri visits some of the oldest and most beautiful libraries in the world. He guides us through the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Trinity College Library in Dublin, which houses the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow, the Laurenziana in Florence, once the private library of the powerful Medici family designed by Michelangelo, and through monastery libraries in both the Old and New Worlds. Massimo Listri. Libraries. Memories of the World is a visual feast for book lovers, an ode to reading and written culture, and a cultural pilgrimage to the places that are the archive and ark of our history.