Recognition of the museum’s role within Western culture has come relatively late in its evolution. In comparison, libraries, universities, and hospitals have—in one configuration or other—been considered functional and valuable elements of civilized society since classical antiquity. Three interesting and emblematic examples, among many, can be cited.

The Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena was the first civic (as opposed to princely or ecclesiastical) library to be founded in Europe. The building was designed by a pupil of Leon Battista Alberti and completed in the 1450s. Its role today remains essentially unchanged; its holdings, interestingly, have not been diminished by the depredations to which monastic and palace libraries were subjected during the Revolutionary Era.

While the “Sacred Infirmary” in Malta no longer ministers to the indigent and the sick, it continued, well into the nineteenth century, a distinguished hospitaller tradition that the Order of Saint John initiated in the eleventh century. In fact, it was in Jerusalem that the Knights of the Order began caring for, as well as defending, the pilgrims streaming into the Holy Land. The hospitals they established there, and later in Rhodes and finally in Malta, performed a humanitarian service not essentially different from that which patients receive in today’s hospitals the world over.

Bologna, with its proud Bononia Docet civic motto, may have been the seat of Europe’s first studium generaleor university. Whether that distinction should more rightly belong to Padua, Salerno, or Paris has been forever debated; what