The magnificent Vatican Apostolic Library is set to reopen next Monday following a three-year $11.5 million renovation, with 21st century technology added to safeguard priceless incunabula, manuscripts and books dating back as far as the 1st century.

Each one of the library’s literary treasures has been fitted with a RFID computer chip capable of emitting radio signals in order to prevent loss and theft.

The undertaking was in part motivated by an attempted theft by an American art history professor, who smuggled pages torn from a 14th century manuscript that once belonged to Petrarch.He was sentenced in 1996 to 14 months in prison after admitting that he took the pages during a research visit in 1987.The electronic chips are also designed to ensure that each priceless document remains in its proper place in the vast repository beneath the Vatican.

“In this kind of library, if a book is misplaced, it is as good as lost,” said Ambrogio Piazzoni, the library’s vice-prefect.”But with this new radio frequency system of identification, it will be much easier to locate a lost book and return it to its rightful place.”

The books and manuscripts in the library were the product of the “thought, passion and faith” of centuries of religious scholarship, he said. “It’s not just the heritage of the Vatican Library but of the whole of humanity.” The renovation also involved the installation of closed-circuit cameras, fireproof walls, automated entry and exit gates and climate-controlled rooms.

Begun by Pope Nicholas V in the 1450s, the library includes the world’s oldest known complete Bible, dating from around 325 and believed to have been commissioned by Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity.

The library’s  glorious frescoed reading and research rooms will officially reopen on Sept 20.