WELCOME TO THE NEW WEBSITE OF THE AMBROSIANA

The Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, one of the oldest and most important Italian cultural institutions, is many things: an extraordinary art gallery that preserves, protects and enhances the value of over 2,000 works (including masterpieces by Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, Brueghel and Caravaggio), as well as a library that holds some one million printed works, tens of thousands of drawings and 40,000 manuscripts, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus.

Finally, it is an Academy, an international scholarly community devoted to promoting the encounter and dialogue between different peoples and varied cultures through multi-disciplinary research in the literary, historical and artistic fields. With this rich heritage, ever since the early 1600s the Ambrosiana has been a literary, scientific and artistic centre of excellence in the heart of Milan. The redesign of the new website started from the understanding of the Ambrosiana’s singular, multiple nature. It was constructed to ensure it would faithfully mirror this and reveal this institution with its strong identity to the general public. Our hope is to create a positive and original cultural energy uniting the three main strands of this great Milanese institution and to place them at the service of the public. Our visitors, the absolute protagonists of the experience online, are welcomed into a space organised and tailored to their needs, where they can be guided by starting from their interests and the time they have available. We are well aware we not cannot replace or reproduce online the intense experience of a visitor contemplating a masterpiece. But we can bring the Ambrosiana and its artworks within reach of the click of a mouse, enabling the users of the site to access an engaging and effective digital experience. The new website, with its clear and refined design, devised to create a dialogue with its rich iconographic heritage, ensures highly organised, modular navigation. It is a privileged instrument for connecting with visitors and capable of enthralling them, generating experiences of generosity, welcoming and caring, fostering a relationship that they will never want to forego and that will grow over time. Even in the digital experience, visitors can thus feel they are part of a universal talent, learning to understand, protect and spread it. Created by VIVA!, a creative agency specialising in the communication and enhancement of cultural institutions