Monastic Library Of St. Gallen Abbey

Few rooms in Europe repay a visit as richly as the Baroque hall of the Abbey Library in St. Gallen. The library belongs to a monastery that goes back to the seventh century, when the Irish monk Gallus settled in the valley of the Steinach, and it holds one of the oldest and most important collections of medieval manuscripts anywhere in the world. The great hall was built between 1758 and 1767 to designs by the architect Peter Thumb, and it is generally counted among the finest Rococo interiors in Switzerland.

The room itself is the first surprise. Pale walls, a ceiling painted with airy scenes, carved and gilded wooden galleries, and a floor of inlaid parquet create a luminous space that feels more like a ballroom than a place of study. To protect the floor, visitors slip over their shoes a pair of large felt overshoes and glide quietly across the boards, a ritual that adds to the sense of entering somewhere special. Above the entrance a Greek inscription, Psyches iatreion, calls the library the healing place of the soul, a phrase that fits the atmosphere of calm and concentration.

The collection is vast. The shelves hold well over a hundred thousand volumes, among them about 2,100 manuscripts, many from the early Middle Ages, and some 1,650 incunabula, which are books printed before 1500. Subjects include theology, law, medicine, astronomy and the classics, and the manuscripts represent a continuous tradition of copying and preservation. Most of the oldest treasures are kept in cabinets and shown in changing exhibitions rather than left out on open shelves. One of the most famous items in the abbey's holdings is the ninth-century plan of an ideal monastery, an extraordinary architectural drawing that has been studied for centuries.

The abbey precinct was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1983. Its history includes setbacks, such as a fire in the tenth century, and the abbey was an independent Benedictine house for many centuries before it was dissolved in the early nineteenth century. The library, however, remained and continues to function as a research institution, which gives the visit a living quality.

The hall is quiet by design, so visitors are asked to speak softly, and flash photography is not allowed. It sits next to the cathedral in the abbey district, and the two make a natural pair for a morning in old St. Gallen.