Naples State Archive, General plants

In the Italian institutional network of 'provincial' State Archives there is no legal diversity:

they must keep the records of the state offices of the provincial district, the notarial papers, and are open to the archives of private and non-state institutions.

They preserve the pre-unification writings, the archives of the already capital cities and in this sense the Grand Archive,

despite the destruction of 1943, is the main written source for the history of the South.

Aggregation archive, that is archive of archives, the Great Archive reflects the history of the third city in the world between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and

preserves the documented traces of fifteen centuries, from the medieval age to today,

stratified and yet immediately legible, indeed practicable in the visit to the imposing, majestic documentary deposits that,

from the first nineteenth-century museum exhibition, with the succession of shelves and writings,

impose themselves on the visitor and suggestively evoke the sense of history.

Traces, document-monument, that the historian, but also the occasional visitor, follow to reconstruct a previous experience,

up to becoming almost contemporary, witnesses and interpreters.

The State Archive was established as a General Archive in 1808 during the period of French domination in Naples.

In its formation, it was affected by the approach of the French

who aimed its function at what is currently called advertising of documents and administrative 'transparency'.