Naples State Archive, Plans and Sections

The Archive provided a service for citizens, making those judicial, administrative and notarial deeds available to private individuals,

for the protection of legitimate interests, against the principle of secrecy of the archives of the Bourbon Crown, and effectively making the 'secret' archives public.

For a happy conjuncture - happy for the archives - it was precisely the suppression of the ancient judiciary,

starting with that of the Royal Chamber of the Summary, which had their headquarters in Castel Capuano,

carried out to give rise to a new and lasting administrative system, to favor the archival concentration in the same location, in the General Archive.

Its establishment had been preceded by two Neapolitan projects: that of the Notarial Archive, designed to bring together sentences, wills,

cadastral documents and other documents useful to private individuals, but which, due to the logistical difficulties of finding and concentrating,

was not never made operational, and that of the Media Aetas Archive, never established for the advent of French domination,

which was based on the main idea of ​​bringing together an immense deposit of medieval interest,

made up of parchment materials of municipal origin and corporations religious suppressed throughout the kingdom of Naples.

The latter in fact formed the Diplomat of the State Archive, lost in the immense war destruction waged by German troops in 1943.

In the Romantic period, the interest for the Greek-Roman antiquity was being replaced, as is known, for the Middle Ages.

The restored Bourbons retained, in a new setting, the Archive institution, while taking over the archives of the Crown,

and established that the Kingdom offices made the payments every five years to the Grand Archive.

The latter, if on the one hand it started to assume the connotation of an office with prevailing administrative functions, on the other,

it appeared dedicated to that work of study, research, transcription, all-round scientific dissemination, with conferences, celebratory exhibitions, participation in international cultural events,

which had allowed to preserve much of the oldest documents, unfortunately destroyed today.