During Cardinal Borromeo's sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601, he envisioned developing this library in Milan as one open to scholars and that would serve as a bulwark of Catholic scholarship in the service of the Counter-Reformation against the treatises issuing from Protestant presses.
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Among Christian and Islamic Arabic manuscripts are treatises on medicine, a unique 11th-century diwan of poets, and the oldest copy of the Kitab Sibawahaihi.
Corti's monument to Cardinal Borromeo was commissioned in 1861 for the plaza of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
According to an inventory dating back to 1615, it had paintings by Titian, Parmigianino, and Michelangelo; the inventory also mentions a book of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which scholars identify with the Codex Atlanticus now preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
In 1609 he founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a college of writers, a seminary of savants, a school of fine arts, and, after the Bodleian at Oxford, the first genuinely public library in Europe.
In 1789, Augustinian Carlo Amoretti, Italian Encyclopedist and librarian of Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, discovered the authentic Italian manuscript of Antonio Pigafetta among the scattered holdings of the library.