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THE CITY OF SAN GEMINI HISTORIC ARCHIVE
The Historic Archives of the city of San Gemini holds all the city documents that predate the Unification of Italy (1861) that are still in the possession of the city.
The documents range in time from the late 14th century to 1861. There is major gap in the documents that includes most of the 15th and early 16th centuries.
The documents are reasonably continuous and orderly after the 1530 when the city Becomes a feudal holding of the Orsini Family. It is not clear why these gap in the documentation exists however it is possible they were destroyed in 1527 when the city is ransacked and burned by the troops of Emperor Charles V or another possibility is that they were lost in the 18th century when there was a fire in the old city hall ( Palazzo Vecchio).
COLLECTIONS
The archives is composed of three main collections (fondi): the Diplomatic ( Diplomatico) , the City records (Comunale), and the notary records ( Notarile).
The "Fondo Diplomatico"
This collection holds 20 parchment manuscripts mostly copies of Papal decrees.
The "Fondo Comunale"
is made up by a series of bound registers holding manuscript records of the deliberations of the city council. The records are manuscripts written in part in Latin and in part in Italian. They where originally written as lose leaf pamphlets and where bound together into registers starting in the 17th century. They were later provided with indexes and marginalia that describe subject matter of documents in Italian. The "Fondo Comunale" also includes various correspondence, property records, and property maps of the city.
The Fondo Notarile
Holds is a substantial collection of notebooks compiled by the local notaries they hold mostly information about sales of property, inheritances, and business transactions. Most of the documents in this collections are "bastardelli" which where notebooks where notaries would write their description of the acts; these would then be transcribed in the registers kept by the college (professional association) of notaries.
THE SAN GEMINI ARCHIVES PROJECT
Is a project being carried out by The San Gemini Preservation Studies Program as part of their field school of book and paper restoration. The project has students engage in three types of activity a) restoration o paper documents ( mostly lose leaf documents ) coming from the ASCSG, b) digitalize the archive and provide online access to such material through this website c) Implement preventive conservative measures on the archival material held by ASCSG.
THE DIGITALIZATION PROJECT
Part of the field work done by the students San Gemini Preservation Studies taking the courses on Bookbinding and Paper Restoration is to digitize every summer a portion of the ASCSG. This ongoing project will take many years; so far the entire "Fondo Diplomatico" has been completed and the books of "riformanze" are being photographed. The material is being published in this website as it is imaged and processed for publication.
The imaging is being done with a Nikon digital camera, the registers are fragile and unique so scanning of the documents has been excluded. The digital images are aim to render the manuscript legible not to replicate accurately the dimensions or coloring of the documents which in fact are slightly distorted by the optics of the camera and by some manipulations of the digital image.
The imaging process generates two sets of images one in tiff format that is used as a permanent digital record by the archives the other is in a PDF format to be exhibited on-line.
THE SAN GEMINI ARCHIVES OPEN PROJECT
Part of the goals that we are setting up is an open project to which any scholar or volunteer from anywhere in the world can participate. The aim is to have over time transcribe, translate, index and interpret all the documents in the ASCSG. We invite any scholars interested in doing research using these documents to deposit their transcriptions, translations and any other scholarly work done with these documents so they can be collected along with the digital archive in order to increase the body of knowledge about the history of this portion of the world.We operate this site with very limited resources we will appreciate very much if you discover any errors in the website to inform us so we can correct them.
USE OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
All the documents presented in this website and their digital copies are property of the Archivio Storico Comune di San Gemini which is part of The Italian State Archives. This material is available for consultation on line free of charge; any other uses of this material must be consistent with Italian law regarding State Archives and the regulations of the Archivio Storico Comune di San Gemini. Any one planning to reproduce, publish, quote or make any other use of this material should consult with the archivist of the ASCSG regarding permissions, fees or any other rules that may apply.
LANGUAGE OF THE WEBSITE
This web site is a dual language Italian - English at times in separate pages at in the same page. Some terms in the website are not translated because the meaning is obvious in the other language.
LOCATION AND CONTACTS
The Archivio Storico Comune di San Gemini is located in the city's public library which is in the former Monastery of the Magdalena.
Address:
Archivio Storico Comune di San Gemini
via Cataone 4
San Gemini (Terni) 05029
Contacts:
Dr. Lucia Ranieri, librarian and archivist
tel: 0744331438
email: info@comune.sangemini.tr.it
Contacts:
San Gemini Archives Digitalization Project
Prof. Massimo Cardillo
International institute for Restoration and Preservations Studies
mcardillo@iirpsemail.org
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