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Registers of debit and credit
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What
is an archive?
Each of us is a potential archivemaker, as each of
us is a memory holder. A memory that does not wish to fade away
and is in search of all means to dwell, to become a real and tangible
object, communicable to others and transmissible in the future.
Up to now, in the Western culture, the main memory
support has been represented by paper documents, constituting a
sort of physical extension of the ways to "stock" individual and collective
memory. The need to keep on paper one's memories and will, relations among
people, foundations of political and social life, has lead throughout
time to a "physical memory sediment": documents have joined other documents
and have looked for a language more and more suitable for the expression
of the original relations and of the will to be carried out.
Such records were handed down from our forefathers
to us, together with monuments, works of art and material objects that
are still surrounding us. It is what we keep producing and hand down to
the future. Indeed, this is how archives originate: documentary
deposits characterised by the fact that each document is deeply bound
up with the others by a network of relations. In fact, this feature
makes them thoroughly different from a library, where each book is, on
the contrary, a defined entity, complete within itself. Understanding
the language expressed by the document and the relations that connect
it to the others can allow us to understand the archive as a whole,
and therefore to find what we are looking for.
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"Books of debtors and creditors"
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However, we must not forget that
these archives - as in all expressions of mankind - do have their own
history: they have grown throughout time, have been preserved and
communicated to and, sometimes, destroyed. They are not some impersonal
and odd entities, nondescript and mysterious: behind each of them, there
is always someone.
The maker usually wants to use the archive
for its own immediate purposes (to rule and run a private or public property,
to manage a business, etc.), and considers the archive as its own, with
an internal organisation meant to ease practically and effectively the
activity carried out. This is the reason why the archive reflects not
only the history of its maker but also the way one chooses to organise
and preserve one's memory patrimony.
In fact, each documentary record, each archive, is always the expression
of someone, and for this reason we may say that it reflects the history
of its maker. This someone can be an individual person or an entire family,
an institution, a body or an association.
Sometimes, the maker wants the archive to be kept
secret, so that no one else can examine it. Besides, one may wish that
only part of it were communicated to in the future and prefers to carefully
select what must be preserved or destroyed.
The history of archives, even of public ones, is marked by this fluctuation,
standing between the wish to preserve and destroy. The original reasons
can vary: sometimes, it is just a will to lighten the load of memory,
to select by cutting out what seems to have become useless with regard
to its initial purposes; but - in other instances - there is a precise
will not to disclose, to transmit only a "censored" image of oneself,
anyhow appreciated by who believes is the memory holder.
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"Files of the Municipal Archives"
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The masters of memory: this
is how we may define those public institutions that, in time, have arrogated
the task to preserve, select and transmit documentary deposits needed
by the exertion of authority. This is why the history of documentary preservation
and transmission is closely linked to the history of power and government,
and it is often necessary to know the scanning and the fundamental events
related to the governments in order to understand what has been handed
down to us and why. The history of archives undergoes a great innovation
when, mainly from the end of XVIII century, one establishes the conception
that the archives constitute a public patrimony, and not an exclusive
and secret property of the power holders. From being power means, they
now vouch for the rights of individual persons, who can freely and directly
have access to them.
At the same time, another important change concerns
their use: the same documents that in the past were necessary to politics,
public and private ruling now become essential material to the work of
historians. The archives, that were already "power arsenals", transform
themselves into "history laboratories". The great archive records
- created in the various States mostly between the end of the Eighteenth
Century and the first half of the Nineteenth Century - can be qualified
more and more as cultural institutions and centres of historical research.
Their full availability also guarantees the opportunity to delve into
the most remote past, as well as into the most recent events.
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What are State Archives?
In Italy, the main preunification states gave origin
to the great general Archives, in which one concentrated records from
public magistracies that, even in ancient times, had ruled those territories:
this is how the Archives of Florence, Naples, Venice, Rome and Milan were
created.
The Central State Archives of Florence, founded in 1852, were the first
to have - right from the beginning - a role of cultural institution open
to the public and intended mainly for historical research.
In relation with other Archives, the ones in Florence had also another
record: they were entirely arranged so that the material sequence of the
archives represented the succession of the political forms of government
that had ruled Florence and Tuscany, from the first Florentine Republic
(end of XIII century) to the Regional State of Tuscany, risen to Rule
of a Grand Duke and run initially by the Medicean Dynasty (1532 - 1737)
and later on by the Lorraine Family (1737 - 1814, with the French interlude).
Each archive therefore found an arrangement deriving not from the contents
of its papers, but from the history of the magistracies that had produced
it.
The supremacy of the historical and institutional
aspects was defined - from that moment onwards - the "historical method",
and in its fundamental features, it still constitutes the base of all
archive arrangements. The cataloguer of the Florentine Archives, Francesco
Bonaini, wrote "when entering an archive, one must not search for the
subjects but for the institutions". Even nowadays, whoever may wish to
consult the memory patrimony of the Archives will have to do this first:
knowing the institutional frame that has produced the archives used in
the research and properly question it.
After the Unity of Italy, the new State assembled
all the archives of the preunification forms of government into one single
administration, under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. The
central archives of the ex-capital cities became the peripheral archives
of the new State, while in Rome, The Central State Archives were constituted
in order to gather all the papers produced by the central bodies of the
State. The legislation of the unified State concerning the archives has
taken care of the preservation and enhancement of the national archive
patrimony and has also supervised what is still being produced and will
constitute the historical sources in the future. The attention paid is
not only meant for what is preserved in the State Archives but also for
archives belonging to public bodies and individual persons. In order to
properly perform this duty, the Law (President's Decree n. 1409 of 30
September 1963) has divided the archive administration into two parts:
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"Photograph of the depository"
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- the State Archives, present in every chief town of a province
and having two main tasks:
- to preserve and enhance the documentary patrimony of the
past in their custody (preunification and notaries' archives, archives
of religious bodies abolished by the State, of public bodies or
individual persons acquired in various ways);
- to gather the patrimony produced by the peripheral offices
of the State, present within the provincial territory. This second
function is performed also through the supervision of the good keeping
of archives belonging to state offices, carried out by bodies called
"committees of inspection and discard", which makes the Archives
an active part of the administration.
- the Archive Superintendence, present in every region and having
the task to supervise the good preservation of the archive records that
are not state-owned.
From 1975, the Italian Archive Administration is under the authority of
the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Environmental Conservation. Since
1998 "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"
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"Winding staircase"
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The pleasure of memory
Making a research in the archive can be an exciting
experience, a real exploration within an unknown territory, which is full
of surprises.
On leaving, we shall not forget to carry the essential instruments with
us in order to guide us, to decode messages, to read hidden signals and
to distinguish what is important from what is not.
Guidelines: the guides, inventories, catalogues, indexes and the
sorting are maps indicating the great routes from which the paths to be
followed start. These instruments are not arranged according to the subject,
as in a "subject catalogue" of a library, but according to the "archive
funds". They describe the body of the documents produced by public institutions,
authorities or individual persons throughout their activity. The first
rule is then to identify the links between what is being searched and
the funds preserved in the Archives.
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The code: the documents
are not always written in a familiar language, as the writing has progressively
developed. A document of XIII century will have a different writing compared
to a document of XVIII century, and both will be different from ours.
Palaeography will help us to understand them.
The hidden signals: in order to understand
the message contained in the document, we will have to understand its
peculiar expression. We shall always remember that we are not the receivers!
The record was written to talk to men of its time, so that they could
use it within their relations. On the contrary, we look for some totally
different information in order to rebuild a story, to understand an event,
a phenomenon, a mentality, etc. Still, the document will keep silent,
if we do not understand its language, and it will hide its treasures of
information made of words that will almost seem useless and incomprehensible.
Where and why? Once we have found what we
were looking for, we shall have to be very careful. It is necessary to
hold our attention and spirit of observation in order not to be deceived:
let us ask ourselves not only if the piece of information is right or
wrong but also why it is contained where we have found it, what meaning
it had when it was written, for what reasons the document or documents
was/were made where we found it/them, why they have been preserved and
not destroyed. The same questions - from a negative point of view - must
be made if our research is not successful: absence, sometimes, is as significant
as presence.
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