The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma (BNCR) was founded in 1875, in order to provide the new-born Italian Kingdom with a National Archive.

The Library, situated in the sixteenth-century Collegio Romano Palace - the former seat of the Jesuitic Bibliotheca Major - was named after King Vittorio Emanuele II. Its first corpus of collections - manuscripts, incunabula and printed books - came from the libraries which had once belonged to the Religious Orders suppressed after the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860.

In 1975 the BNCR moved to a new building situated on the archaeological site of the Castrum Praetorium. It consists of three separated blocks: the readers area, the staff offices and the book storehouse, occupying a total surface of more than 40,000 square metres.

A radical change is under way in order to improve reception and services for readers; it will be carried on by an architectural project within the year 2000.

In compliance with the provisions regarding the two Italian National Central Libraries (Rome and Florence), the BNCR's main mission consists in preserving the national cultural heritage, developing its own cultural role and providing a strategic plan for services.

Its early collections are continuously increased by the legal deposit of all Italian publications. The Library holds and acquires the most important collections of foreign books, in order to document the main aspects of culture and the studies about Italy in the world.

The BNCR has the institutional duty to edit BOMS, Bollettino delle opere moderne straniere possedute dalle biblioteche statali in Italia - the Union Catalogue of Modern Foreign Books owned by Italian State Libraries and to manage the Centro Nazionale per lo Studio del Manoscritto (National Centre for the Study of Manuscripts), collecting more than 100,000 microfilmed manuscripts owned by governmental, religious and public libraries. Its goal is to constitute a national safety archive for manuscripts and to increase their availability.

Due to a special law issued in 1975, the Library can autonomously administer yearly funds, recently increased by exceptional provisions from the Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali to organize all new technology or quality tools. Other resources are earned by the enforcement of the 'Ronchey Law', which let State Libraries sell goods and services.

Recent statistics shows that readers are over half a million per year.