Archives resources in Italy
Italy has a national portal to access its civil archives. Its name is Antenati, which literally means "Gate of the Ancestors". This portail is avaible in English, but of course genuine documents are not.
Antenati Portal's online resources are mostly civil records, though parish records are included as well for central and Northern Italy, where civil records were introduced for a short time under the Napoleonic occupation (1806-1814). In Southern Italy instead, in the territories of the former Kingdom of Naples (or Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) civil records were introduced in 1809 and continued to be kept with no interruption to our days.
The divisions by period reflect the political history of Italy:
- Stato Civile Napoleonico: from 1809 for the Kingdom of Naples, earlier for Northern Italy, to 1815 at the latest.
- Stato Civile della Restaurazione: usually only for the Kingdom of Naples, from 1816 to 1860.
- Stato Civile Italiano: usually from 1861 to 1865 and later for Southern Italy, or from 1866 for places in central and northern Italy, and sometimes reaching up to the early decades of the 20th century.
The registers of the Italian "Uffici di Stato Civile" kept in the State Archives include the second copy of the records of birth, marriage, death and citizenship records, received from the respective Tribunals together with sometmes 10-year alphabetic indexes and any attachments. For most places in Central and Northern Italy, offices started to keep records from about 1870 as established by royal decree no. 2602 on 15 November 1865.
By the and of January 2020, the Antenati portal numbers are:
- 98 863 821 images
- related to 1 337 214 registries
- from 64 state archives
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