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Three nineteenth century books in a rare book collection Safely locked away in the basement of the KNIR library, a collection of over 500 rare books lay dormant. On one of the bottom shelves a golden reverberation catches the eye, coming from the spines of Histoire du Mobilier (1876), Histoire de la Gravure (1880) and Histoire de la...

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Printed illustrations of ruins and their role in the imaging of Rome As anyone who has ever been to Rome will tell you, it is almost impossible these days to walk around the city without seeing tourists peering at their guidebooks and street vendors trying to sell replicas of the most important monuments and drawings of the famous...

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Atlases at the KNIR Library People who are interested in old city maps, can take pleasure in browsing through KNIR's cartography collection. This library contains some of the most splendid atlases, like Braun and Hogenberg's famous Civitates Orbis Terrarum from 1574, which is the largest compilation of town maps and illustrations ever published. Another old map one can...

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Correspondence between a 17th century traveler and his friend When Frederik Haring, a 17th century Leiden-based book seller, was offered an unknown travel manuscript, he read only the front page and then asked himself the question: do people really want to read another travelogue on Rome? As one of the main travel destinations in Europe, there had been...

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The Dutch interest in the Christian catacombs  Try to imagine an underground network of more than 3 ha, with a labyrinth of corridors that stretches over 4,5 kilometers long on three different levels. It is dark and quiet. The walls around you are mostly bare, with an occasional decorated niche. Carved out in these walls are rectangular spaces,...

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Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome