Palazzo Guglielmi Chiablese

The palace was built in 1776 for Benedetto di Savoia, duke of Chiablese. It was sold to the Guglielmi, who rebuilt it entirely around 1880 into its present form; the wing facing the square was added after the old church of Santi Sebastiano e Valentino dei Mercanti, which stood in the middle of the square, was demolished. The library was founded with the Institute in 1925, and in 1926 Giovanni Gentile endowed it with the private collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century encyclopaedias and lexicons of the engineer Aldo Santi, the puzzle-setter known as Duca Borso.