sentences:  It is from southern Italy that we receive the most enduring image of early Christian (and monastic) libraries and librarianship, in the person of Cassiodorus.Like no one else of his time, he leaves us a compendious work of bibliography, the Institituiones divinarum et saecularum litterarum (Institutes of Divine and Secular Literature), which surveys first Christian and then secular texts, providing notes and commentary along the way.An earlier attempt at Rome to establish a theological school had been frustrated, and so on his family's estate at Calabria he established the “Vivarium”, as a setting in which “to incorporate systematic theological study into monastic life.” (Gamble, 1990) With this in view he assembled a large library of both Christian and Classical texts and designed a curriculum of study.