Presentazione

The presentation outlines the intellectual framework, aims, and organizational principles of the international conference whose proceedings are collected in this volume, situating it within the long-standing scholarly activity of the Associazione Italiana dei Paleografi e Diplomatisti. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic and held in hybrid form in September 2021, the conference is retrospectively interpreted as both an act of scholarly resilience and an opportunity to reassess a classic historiographical theme: the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The authors clarify the methodological choice to investigate this transition through books and libraries—understood as codified instruments of knowledge and as institutional spaces of accumulation and transmission—using the manuscript heritage of Verona as a privileged but not exclusive point of departure. Emphasis is placed on the exceptional continuity of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona, whose holdings document uninterrupted intellectual activity between the fifth and tenth centuries, closely intertwined with the city’s political, ecclesiastical, and cultural centrality. Rather than proposing a monographic focus on Verona, the presentation highlights the heuristic use of Veronese manuscripts as case studies (pietre d’inciampo) for broader inquiries into graphic traditions, textual corpora, and models of learning across different cultural domains. The concluding section situates the volume within contemporary debates on open science, underscoring its inclusion in CISAM’s open-access programme and its contribution to wider infrastructures for the dissemination and reuse of scholarly research.