The complexity and peculiarity of the events that led to the founding of the State Archive of Milan necessitate a brief digression into its history, from its origins through to the present day.
The roots of the State Archive of Milan, as we know it today, can be traced to the transfer to San Fedele, site of the former Jesuit school, of the documents stored in the castle of Porta Giovia in Milan in 1781. In 1786 a Directorate-General for Archives was set up and this was followed in the Napoleonic era by a general prefecture for archives and libraries overseen by the Ministry of the Interior. With the return of the Austrians came the return of the Directorate-General for Archives which, with the unification of Italy, finally became the archive management office. The documents had been transferred to San Fedele at the behest of Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, minister to Maria Theresa of Austria, who feared that the archive would be in serious danger were it to remain in the castle which had already been destroyed, together with the majority of the documentation pertaining to the Visconti period of rule, during the time of the Ambrosian Republic in 1447.
The documents of the Sforza signoria, and its Spanish and Austrian successors, formed the first nucleus of the archive as we know it today. As well as the records of the Sforza public offices and the handful of Visconti documents that had survived the destruction of the castle or been recovered in various ways, also added to the Castle archive were the documents of the secret council, the Spanish and Austrian records offices, the interim and provisional government councils, and the registers of statutes containing sovereign acts. In 1786 the above papers were joined at San Fedele by the archives of the ordinary and extraordinary judiciaries (Magistrato ordinario and Magistrato straordinario, the new fiscal and judicial board (Magistrato camerale) and the court of accounts so that government and treasury records were housed in the same place. The classifications by topic carried out by Ilario Corte and Luca Peroni led to the combination of the two archives and the loss of their respective identities, the single archive formed eventually evolving into what would become known as Government acts. The quantity of documentary materials preserved at San Fedele increased with the collection of the archives of the Cisalpine period, the second Cisalpine Republic and the Italian Republic, for the most part added to the series formed as a result of the Peroni classification.
Other collections of documents were formed at different times in different places: the archive of the Senate, the State’s biggest judicial body, was preserved at San Damiano where it was joined by the documents produced by the Chancery of the podestà (Curia dei podestà) and the Judges of justice (Giudici di giustizia) which made up the judicial records; from 1787, and continuing into the Napoleonic and Restoration era, the former convent of Santo Spirito gathered the archives of the ecclesiastical institutions suppressed in the State of Milan, the reorganisation of which was necessary for the correct functioning of the Religious records office, founded in 1787 to administer bona vacantia; this reorganisation took place in 1839 according to the Peroni method and although the archive remained distinct from the others it had already diminished in size due to the creation of the Diplomatic archive at San Fedele, from where it was transferred to the rectory of San Bartolomeo in 1816. Here it was managed independently before returning to San Fedele in 1852 and being merged with the Religious records in 1865.
In the meantime, the military archive with the acts of the Ministry of War had been founded on the site of the former Collegio Elvetico, from where it was later transferred to San Fedele, while the financial records archive had been formed in Palazzo Marino, moving in 1831 to the former Bocchetto convent. The Broletto was identified as the site of the public notarial acts archive in which Maria Theresa of Austria wished to preserve the acts of deceased notaries that had worked in the duchy of Milan.
In the middle of the 19th century the collection of documents at San Fedele (government and treasury records, Napoleonic archive, judicial records, religious records, military archives) were joined by the financial documents from the Bocchetto and the notarial acts from the Broletto. The documentary material forming the basis of the State archive was therefore distributed across these three sites. It was the famous general manager of the Lombardy archives, Luigi Osio, who identified the building that had once housed the Collegio Elvetico - the Swiss seminary college - and later the Napoleonic Senate, from which it took the name by which it still known today, as the ideal place for storing the collections of records that had been formed and making them available for study and research purposes, even if the process of taking possession of the site was a long and complex. Osio had first thought of the former Collegio Elvetico as a possible solution when noting the lack of space available to the archives back in 1860, an idea he reiterated in 1866 due to San Fedele’s reluctance to accept new deposits; quotes, surveys and bidding processes for the transport and organisation of the government, judicial and financial records archives at the Collegio Elvetico followed in 1871, but in 1884 people were still talking about the slow pace of moving the archives from San Fedele to Palazzo del Senato, a consequence of the consolidation work being carried out on the structures. Finally, by 1886 space had been found for all the archives in the former Collegio Elvetico except for the notarial acts archive which was deposited in 1944. The judicial records were subsequently transferred to the former convent of San Eustorgio where a remote hub of the State Archive was set up.
This quick look at the events that contributed to the formation, collection, transfer and organisation of the archives in the building that still houses them today provides a clear hint of the depth and value of the documents that laid the foundations of the State Archive, an institution which would subsequently welcome archives deposited by the tax, judicial and administrative offices created with the unification of Italy and operational in the province of Milan (land registry documents, Prefecture documents, Court records, Military district records, notarial acts, etc.). Nevertheless, notwithstanding the “cleaning out” of the majority of the material in the Government acts archive in the 19th century, notwithstanding the losses and destruction of archive materials due to uprisings, natural disasters and other events, it is important to underline the most recent serious losses caused by the bombs dropped on the city in Milan in 1943 which seriously damaged the convent of San Eustorgio, destroying much of the judicial archive stored there. Also hit was Palazzo del Senato, from which materials were being removed and transferred to safer locations, damaging lots of documents including the financial records archive. The report (1) on the damage suffered by the State Archive of Milan during World War Two outlines the extent of the losses.
(Text published in Archivio di Stato di Milano, by M. B. Bertini and M. Valori - Archivi Italiani series, Rome, Directorate-General for Archives of the Ministry of Heritage and Cultural Activities - Civitavecchia, BetaGamma editrice, 2001, pp. 13-16).
(1) I danni di guerra subiti dagli archivi italiani, “Notizie degli Archivi di Stato”, aa. IV-VII, Roma 1944-47, single edition, Rome 1950
By Giovanni Liva, State archivist
