Camões Collection

The Instituto Camões, the abbreviated name for Instituto Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, I.P., is a body under the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dedicated to international cooperation and to the promotion and dissemination of Portuguese language and culture worldwide. The institute is named after Luís de Camões (c. 1525-1580), regarded as the father of Portuguese literary tradition, whose work has profoundly influenced Portuguese culture and Lusophone history. As the institution responsible for the teaching and dissemination of Portuguese language and culture abroad, Instituto Camões ensures the presence of Portuguese lecturers at foreign universities, including in Italy, and to this day funds the presence of a native-speaking lecturer at our university. As part of these efforts, Instituto Camões has fostered a strong and lasting collaboration with the Chair of Portuguese Language and Literature at our university, established in 1985. Over the years, it has promoted various cultural initiatives organised by Portuguese language lecturers and has supported teaching and research through generous donations of library materials, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s, which have since been consolidated into the Camões Collection. Located under the classification 12L.I.CAM., the collection comprises a wealth of rare or hard-to-access books, at least within Italy, covering the vast cultural landscape of the Portuguese language and its literary traditions, including Portuguese, Brazilian, Angolan, Cape Verdean, and Mozambican literature, among others. It consists of 1,376 monographs, mostly published between the 1970s and 1990s, and is divided into four distinct sections: C for literary criticism (275 monographs), L for language and linguistics (73 monographs), T for texts by Lusophone authors (540 monographs), and V for various subjects (499 monographs), with a particular focus on history, geography, and art history. All volumes in the Camões Collection are available for loan, with a few exceptions due to their condition or special value.