Culture between the 1800’s and the 1900’s

On the 16^th of September 1888, the original fund for what would become the Nicolò and Paola Francone Public Library of Chieri, was constituted. Within the ambit of the Society for Welfare and Instruction, a mutual aid society founded that same year with the aim of providing social assistance and promoting education, and which continued it’s activities until 1939, a public library was opened. The person behind this was an enthusiastic young university student, a liberal Catholic by the name of Nicolò Francone. Between the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s, Chieri saw a decisive passage from a predominantly agricultural and artisan economy to one of an industrial nature. From this new need to know and to know how, the shape of the library began to be articulated in various sectors: scholastic, popular, textbooks. The budding library was characterised in an original manner by the acquisition of two important legacies: the Fondo Michele Sacerdote in 1890 circa and the Fondo Alberto Cornaglia in 1918. They enriched the library with their ancient volumes published between XVI and the first half of the XIX century. Today the  Nicolò Francone Room, which can be found in the the Nicolò and Paola Francone Public Library of Chieri, holds around 7000 volumes of books, newspapers and articles from that time.