Alexandria
The Library of Alexandria is considered the most significant library of the ancient world and was the centre of Hellenistic scholarship. The fate of this library, which housed possibly hundreds of thousands papyrus scrolls, is unknown today.

Atlantis (General Reading Room)
Plato described the mythical island realm of Atlantis as a political parable: an ideal state that perished due to earthquakes and floods. Whether Atlantis, if it ever existed, had a library, is something we will never know ...

Berlin (Newspapers)
The newspaper reading room bears the name of the newspaper city of Berlin. In the 1920s, more than 100 daily and weekly newspapers were published here, many of them in the historic newspaper district around Kochstraße.

Jerusalem (Group Study Room)
The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem was established almost simultaneously with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. It collects literature related to Judaism and preserves the memory of Jewish German culture that has been dispersed and destroyed by Nazi persecution.

Karthago (Maps)
The library of the Phoenician maritime and trading power of Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC at the end of the Third Punic War when Cato the Elder ordered the destruction of the city. The loss can only be adumbrated.

Oxford (Events)
Oxford University‘s Bodleian Library, opened in 1602, is the second largest library in the United Kingdom after the British Library. To use the library, readers must swear, either in writing or verbally, not to harm the library and to abide by all its rules.

Sakya
The Buddhist monastery Sakya was the political centre of Tibet in the 13th/14th century. It is located at an altitude of 4,280 metres. To this day, it houses the
most valuable documents of Tibetan written cultural heritage.

Utopia (Children's and Young People's Literature)
In 1516, Thomas More described an ideal of social coexistence in his work about the fictional island of Utopia. To this day, Utopia stands for the idealised dream of a peaceful and just social order.

Venedig (Rare Books)
The lagoon city was and is a centre of intercultural exchange. The book printer Aldus Manutius, the most important publisher of Greek texts at the time, worked here. His books bear the famous signet with anchor and dolphin. The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, founded in 1468, is one of the largest national libraries in Italy and is situated in Venice. It owns over 900,000 volumes and an important collection of Greek, Latin and Oriental manuscripts.

Vivarium (Manuscripts)
Around 554, the late antique Roman statesman and writer Cassiodorus founded a monastery for scholars on his property in Calabria, which was named after the surrounding fish ponds. In its scriptorium, works of the church faters as well as classical philosophy, rhetoric and poetry were copied. Although Vivarium only existed for 30 years, it was a model for many later monastic libraries preserving and passing on the works of antiquity.

Wien (Music)
Music and the city of Vienna are inextricably linked in the era known as "Viennese Classicism" with the triumvirate Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven at the forefront. Even today, the Austrian capital is one of the world's leading music centres. Rich source material from the Viennese musical tradition has found its way into the Berlin State Library, thus forming a musical bridge from Danube to Spree.