The Most Beautiful Libraries in Europe

13 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Clementinum

   Klementinum

   Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.087° N 14.416° E

   

   The reason to come is the Baroque Library Hall, finished in 1722. It is a long, two-storey room of carved bookcases and gilded Corinthian columns, with a slender gallery running around the upper shelves and a painted ceiling by Jan Hiebl that pretends to open into a dome. The frescoes celebrate learning as a temple of wisdom, and down the middle of the floor stands a line of old terrestrial and celestial globes. Around 27,000 volumes, mostly theology and much of it in foreign languages, fill the cases. Visitors look in from the doorway rather than walk the floor, which keeps the room exactly as it should be seen: quiet, warm and unbroken from end to end.

   Did you know? Jorge Luis Borges set part of his 1943 short story The Secret Miracle in the Clementinum library, where its hero dreams of a hidden letter that holds God.

   More about Clementinum →

2. 02 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

   Italy · 0.7 km from Florence43.775° N 11.255° E

   

   Pope Clement VII, born Giulio de' Medici, commissioned the library in 1523 to house the family's collection of manuscripts and to show that the Medici were patrons of learning as well as bankers. Michelangelo designed it above the cloister of the church of San Lorenzo, and building began in 1525. When he left Florence for good in 1534, only the walls of the reading room stood; the work was completed by Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari and Bartolomeo Ammannati, following his drawings and instructions. Ammannati built the staircase in 1559 from a clay model sent by Michelangelo: its central flight has curved, oval treads, and it splits into three flights as it descends. The library opened in 1571.

   Did you know? Michelangelo first imagined the staircase in walnut, but Cosimo I had Ammannati build it in grey pietra serena stone instead.

   More about Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana →

3. 03 Radcliffe Camera

   United Kingdom · 0.4 km from Oxford51.753° N 1.254° W

   

   The money came from the physician John Radcliffe, who died in 1714 leaving £40,000 to the university for a new library. The bequest could only be released after the death of his sisters, the last of them in 1736, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had made the first designs, died that same year. The commission passed to James Gibbs, who laid the foundation stone on 17 May 1737; the building was finished in 1748 and opened on 13 April 1749. Gibbs combined the sobriety of English Palladianism with a Baroque sense of drama: a heavily rusticated ground storey carries the giant order of the upper floors, and the dome gathers the whole composition into a single upward movement.

   Did you know? Some 41 tonnes of Derbyshire lead were used on the roof, and the ashlar walls are built of local Headington and Burford stone.

   More about Radcliffe Camera →

4. 04 Abbey Library of St. Gallen

   Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen

   Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.376° E

   

   The library goes back to the monastery founded in the 8th century, under its first abbot, Saint Othmar; its books survived the fire of 937 that destroyed the abbey itself. The present hall was built between 1758 and 1767 by the architect Peter Thumb and his son, as the monks' study and reading room. Its shelves hold part of a collection of about 160,000 volumes, including some 2,100 manuscripts written between the 8th and 15th centuries and around 1,650 incunabula, books printed before 1500. Among them are Irish, Carolingian and Ottonian codices and manuscript B of the Nibelungenlied, one of the principal texts of the German heroic epic. Over 900 manuscripts can now be read online.

   Did you know? Its Abrogans, a Latin–German glossary, is considered the oldest book in the German language and also contains an early German version of the Lord's Prayer.

   More about Abbey Library of St. Gallen →

5. 05 Antiquarium (Munich Residenz)

   Antiquarium

   Germany · 1.1 km from Munich48.141° N 11.579° E

   

   The hall did not keep that purpose for long. The library moved out in 1581, and between the 1580s and 1600 Duke Wilhelm V and his son Maximilian I turned the Antiquarium into a festive banqueting hall. The painter and designer Friedrich Sustris directed the transformation, and the result is a room in which almost every surface is ornamented. Sixteen large paintings from the workshop of Peter Candid on the vault present allegories of virtue and fame, while grotesques in the classical manner — slender tendrils, masks, fantastic creatures — fill the spaces between them.

   Did you know? The Loredan purchase alone brought 91 portrait heads, 43 statues and torsos, 33 reliefs, about 120 small bronzes and roughly 2,500 Greek and Roman coins.

   More about Antiquarium (Munich Residenz) →

6. 06 Strahov Monastery Library

   Strahovský klášter

   Czech Republic · 2.4 km from Prague50.086° N 14.389° E

   

   The collection runs to more than 200,000 volumes, including over 3,000 manuscripts, and it is housed in two halls built a century apart. The Theological Hall, completed in 1679, is a long gallery whose vaulted ceiling was painted by Siard Nosecký, with wooden bookcases running along its walls. The Philosophical Hall, built in the 1780s, is taller and grander: its shelves climb towards a ceiling covered by a sweeping fresco by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, a leading painter of the late Central European Baroque.

   Did you know? The walnut bookcases of the Philosophical Hall came from the dissolved monastery of Louka near Znojmo and were dismantled and refitted here by carpenter Jan Lahofer.

   More about Strahov Monastery Library →

7. 07 Sainte-Geneviève Library

   Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

   France · 1.3 km from Paris48.847° N 2.346° E

   

   The collection is far older than the building. It descends from the library of the Abbey of Saint Genevieve, founded on this hill in the early 6th century and recorded as holding books by 831. The abbey's books were reassembled after Viking raids, revived in the 17th century under Cardinal François de La Rochefoucauld, and survived the Revolution intact thanks largely to its director, the astronomer Alexandre Pingré. When it lost its old premises to the neighbouring Lycée Henri-IV in the 1840s, the state commissioned Henri Labrouste, a winner of the Prix de Rome, to design a new home on the site of the medieval Collège de Montaigu.

   Did you know? Martin Scorsese used the reading room as the Film Academy Library in Hugo, a film that won five Academy Awards.

   More about Sainte-Geneviève Library →

8. 08 Admont Abbey

   Stift Admont

   Austria47.575° N 14.462° E

   

   The hall was completed in 1776 to a plan by the architect Josef Hueber, and it was conceived entirely in the spirit of the Enlightenment, in which light meant knowledge. It is some 70 metres long, 14 metres wide and 13 metres high, with tall windows letting daylight flood the gilded late-baroque shelving that holds around 70,000 of the abbey's 200,000 volumes. Seven ceiling cupolas carry frescoes painted by Bartolomeo Altomonte when he was about eighty, among them an allegory of the dawn of reason in which Aurora and the geniuses of language wake the dreaming Morpheus. The sculptures are by the abbey's own sculptor, Josef Stammel, whose carved figures bring a vivid drama to the room.

   Did you know? In 2017 the library announced two parchment fragments of the Abrogans, a Latin–Old High German glossary from around 800, once reused in a book binding.

   More about Admont Abbey →

9. 09 Biblioteca Joanina

   Portugal · 1.1 km from Coimbra40.207° N 8.427° W

   

   The main floor is a sequence of three rooms linked by decorated arches, each lined with two-tier bookcases. Each room has its own ground colour, green in the first, red in the second and black in the third, and against it gold chinoiserie, the fashionable Oriental motifs of the day, glitters on every surface. The ceilings, by the Lisbon painters António Simões Ribeiro and Vicente Nunes, are peopled with figures of the arts and sciences, with Divine Wisdom at the centre. Much of the timber is exotic hardwood brought from Brazil.

   Did you know? Its layout resembles a chapel: the portrait of King John V hangs where an altar would be, framed by a painted gilt curtain drawn open.

   More about Biblioteca Joanina →

10. 10 John Rylands Library

    United Kingdom · 0.6 km from Manchester53.480° N 2.249° W

    

    The architect, Basil Champneys, worked in a Neo-Gothic manner touched by the Arts and Crafts movement. Two Cumbrian sandstones give the building its character: a dark red stone from near Penrith on the outside, and a softer sand-to-pink stone from Dalston for the interiors, which glow warmly under the vaults. The main reading room was deliberately lifted to the first floor and set back from the street, so that readers would be removed from the noise and soot of the industrial city; oriel windows and a clerestory flood it with light. The library was also one of the first buildings in Manchester to use electric light, producing its own direct-current supply until 1950.

    Did you know? From 1900 the building had an early air-cleaning system: electric fans drew street air through coke screens sprayed with water to strip out soot.

    More about John Rylands Library →

11. 11 Duchess Anna Amalia Library

    Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

    Germany · 18.2 km from Jena50.979° N 11.332° E

    

    The building is the Green Palace, a Renaissance residence built between 1562 and 1569 by the court builders Nikolaus Gromann and Erhard van Mehren, probably named for the green patina of its copper roof. The ducal library had been founded in 1691, when Duke Wilhelm Ernst opened his books to readers; in 1766 Duchess Anna Amalia, regent of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, moved it here, and in 1805, at Goethe's suggestion, the old town tower next door was joined to it as a book store. Goethe supervised the library for 35 years until his death in 1832 and made it one of the leading libraries in Germany.

    Did you know? The 2004 blaze was the worst library fire in Germany since the Second World War, probably started by a smouldering fault in an electrical cable.

    More about Duchess Anna Amalia Library →

12. 12 Old Library, Trinity College Dublin

    The Old Library

    Ireland · 0.3 km from Dublin53.344° N 6.257° W

    

    The room did not always look like this. Burgh gave it a flat plaster ceiling and a single level of shelving arranged in forty oak alcoves. Because the college had the right to claim copies of books published in Britain and Ireland, the shelves filled relentlessly, and in the 1860s the roof was lifted and the great barrel vault was built, with a second tier of galleries above the first. That later ceiling is what gives the Long Room its famous sense of perspective, the curve of the vault and the rows of spines drawing the eye all the way down to the far end. It is home to about 200,000 of the library's oldest books.

    Did you know? The library has enjoyed legal deposit rights since 1801 and is the only library in Ireland entitled to a copy of books published in the UK.

    More about Old Library, Trinity College Dublin →

13. 13 State Hall of the Austrian National Library

    Prunksaal der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek

    Austria · 0.5 km from Vienna48.206° N 16.367° E

    

    The library wing was commissioned by Emperor Charles VI and begun around 1721 to designs by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the leading architect of Austrian Baroque; after his death in 1723 his son Joseph Emanuel completed it. The painter Daniel Gran covered the ceilings. The dome shows an apotheosis of the emperor, whose portrait is held aloft by Hercules and Apollo amid allegories of the virtues of the Habsburgs and the riches of their lands, and the two long arms of the hall answer each other as a "war" side and a "peace" side, following the original arrangement of the books.

    Did you know? Emperor Leopold I began an earlier library building in 1681, but it was destroyed before completion during the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

    More about State Hall of the Austrian National Library →