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This brief introduction underlines how the sixth century, split between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, is also crossed by “horizontal” divisions of ethnic, religious and cultural types, headed by the different protagonists of the century: Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Lombards. In short, in terms of cultural history the sixth century appears to be, much more than others, a centennial marked by that “clash of civilisations”, of which the manuscripts here displayed were, then, protagonists, and today, privileged witnesses.