Archivio di Stato di Brescia

From the Italian Wikipedia page

The State Archives of Brescia, Italy is the peripheral office of the Ministry for cultural heritage and activities which according to the law preserves the historical documentation produced by the peripheral offices of the State of the province of Brescia and for voluntary storage, temporary storage, donation or purchase of any other archive or documentary collection of historical importance.

The first concentrated archive intended for the collection of Brescia's public documentation originates from a Venetian ducal of April 30, 1661, which ordered the city rectors "to establish an archive of the records concerning public interests" in the Broletto palace.

This archive, called the "Old Archive" and intended to collect the documentation of the Venetian magistrates active in Brescia, was flanked by a second archive called "Civil Nuovo", set up at the civic building of the Loggia for the purpose of preserving above all the documentation produced by the organs. judicial and notaries from Brescia. During the 1920s, both archives were subjected to governmental authority, until in 1839 a real "General Archive of Governmental and Judicial Deposit" was established, placed under the direction of the General Directorate of Archives of Lombardy government deposit.

The institute took the name of Brescia State Archives from 1871, when, in implementation of the Royal Decrees 5 March n. 1852 and March 26 n. 1861, the archival organization of the Kingdom of Italy was established, placed under the Ministry of the Interior.

Some documents of Brescia for the period of the Italian Social Republic are found at the ACS, transported to Rome probably following the recovery operations of the archives of the central organs of the State, transferred to the North after the armistice of 1943.

The oldest original document from the Brescia State Archives dates back to the 9th century, while others from the 8th century have been handed down in subsequent copies. Unfortunately, significant dispersions occurred in the first decades of the nineteenth century have impoverished the series of the Venetian judiciary, especially with regard to the fifteenth century, while the preserved documentation is more consistent starting from the sixteenth century and becomes gradually richer until the end of the Venetian domination.

The funds of the judiciary and offices of the Napoleonic age, of the following one, during which the Bresciano was aggregated to the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom, as well as of the post-unification period are preserved almost complete.

The Institute holds the historical archive of the Municipality of Brescia, with documentation dating back to the medieval period, that of the Ospedale Maggiore and those of the charitable and assistance institutes, pious works and pious places.

Funds of undoubted interest are also the archive of the statesman Giuseppe Zanardelli; the Carteggi collection of the First World War, which preserves thousands of letters and photographs of fallen soldiers from the provinces of Brescia and Cremona; the archives of the Martinengo dalle Palle and Gambara families, with documents from the 12th century and considerable correspondence from the 15th to the 19th century; the Religion Fund which collects documents of religious and monastic bodies suppressed from the 13th to the 18th century. Finally, do not forget the large notarial archive with abbreviations and documents from the 14th century.

In the last century the heritage of the Brescia State Archives was described in various guides but to arrive at a "mapping" of the Brescia archival heritage one must wait for the beginning of the 1980s with the publication of the first volume of the General Guide of the Archives of Italian state. Despite the scarce information provided regarding the nature of the archival funds, the editor of the item paid particular attention to identifying the producing subjects, not always correctly indicated in the existing research tools.