Public tours of the Rare Books & Special Collections Fall Exhibit are offered every Wednesday at 12:15pm (except October 6). Tours are also available for classes or other groups, including K-12 audiences, by request.
Registration is not required and tours are free and open to the public.
About the Exhibit
This year marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, and the milestone is being celebrated around the world. In conjunction with this anniversary, our current exhibit showcases the preeminent Dante collection held by the University of Notre Dame.
Rev. John A. Zahm, C.S.C., initiated the collection in 1902 with the purchase of forty-eight important early print volumes of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. This year we are celebrating the legacy of the Zahm Dante Collection, and the remarkable accumulation of rare material acquired over the past century to enhance the scholarly value of the collection.
Highlights of the exhibition include rare printings of the three crowns of Italian literature — Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio — as well as verse anthologies of poetry and other tools such as grammars and dictionaries that would have assisted 16th-century readers of vernacular literature.
This exhibit was curated by Tracy Bergstrom (Curator, Italian Studies and Dante Collection), Chiara Sbordoni (Adjunct Professor in Italian, Rome Global Gateway), and Demetrio Yocum (Senior Research Associate, Center for Italian Studies). This and other exhibits within the library are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.