The Accademia delle Scienze library is among the oldest and richest in Torino. Hosted since its beginning in the former Collegio dei Nobili, a seventeenth-century palace in the city centre, which owes its existence to the Accademia delle Scienze establishment at the will of King Vittorio Amedeo III of Savoia. In 1783, he decided to give royal dignity to a private company dedicated to the study of science, founded in 1757 by the mathematician J.-L. Lagrange, the physician G.F. Cigna, and the chemist G.A. Saluzzo. The first collections derived from book exchanges with other European academies and scientific institutions as well as from the legacy of entire private collections (this is the case for the collections of the bibliophile and scholar C.G. Caissotti, the traveller and collector C. Vidua, the abbot C. Gazzera, the jurist F. Sclopis, and the astronomer G. Plana). In 1801, the categories of moral, historical, and philological sciences were created and from that moment the library began to acquire texts also relating to humanities. Today, the library has an estimated patrimony of about 300,000 books: the courtly halls of the first piano nobile, with eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century decorations, the famous Coronelli globes, as well as the precious full-height bookcases, form a piece of rare beauty in the cultural panorama of Torino.
