Switzerland’s Ancient Baroque Library: A Vault of Medieval Minds

A visit to the Abbey Library of St Gallen in eastern Switzerland reveals a 1,300‑year‑old Baroque hall housing about 160,000 manuscripts and over 2,100 medieval codices, including Ireland’s largest mainland manuscript collection. Surviving upheavals from revolutions to reformations, the library now blends scholarship with tourism, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors who help sustain this ancient repository of knowledge.