Processi antichi
Item
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Country
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IT
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Name of institution (English)
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State Archives of Naples
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Language of name of institution
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ita
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Contact information: postal address
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Piazzetta del Grande Archivio 5, 80138 Naples
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Contact information: phone number
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0039 0815638111
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Contact information: email
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as-na@beniculturali.it
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Reference number
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Processi antichi
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Title (English)
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Old Processes
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Title (official language of the state)
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Processi antichi
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Language of title
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ita
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Creator / accumulator
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Archivio di Stato di Napoli
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Date note
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15th century/1808
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Language(s)
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ita
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lat
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Extent
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360,745 storage units
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Type of material
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Textual Material
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Scope and content
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The Processi antichi comprises procedural files from diverse courts of the Kingdom of Naples, organised in "pandette" (set of legal records). One of its series, the Pandetta Nuovissima, comprises about 80,000 units, inventoried in 20 volumes of indexes and catalogues (signatures: 757 to 776).
Among this extensive fonds, there is some documentation related to the Jewish community of Naples, in particular in the troubled period from the late 15th century to the early 1540s. Some of these records are directly related to Iberian Jews, since Naples was one of the destinations of the exiles of the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century. When Spain recovered Naples in 1510, after the French domination (1495-1510), the settlement of Jews in the Kingdom was only allowed to those who paid an amount of 300 ducati to stay. The others were banished. The pressure on the Jews increased in the following decades and, in the early 1540s, they left Naples. Despite this instability, some illustrious Sephardic families settled in the city, such as the Abravanel. In her article on the economic activity of the Abravenels in Southern Italy, Filena Patroni Griffi identified an appeal presented by Samuel Abravanel and two partners to the Sacro Regio Consiglio against a sentence issued by Ferdinando di Sangro, the governor of Capitanata and Molise. According to these records, Samuel Abravanel used to purchase wheat to small farmers for a low price, thus obtaining high incomes (Pandetta nuovissima, fascio 249, fol. 1, December 1538).
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Archival history
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The Processi antichi are sorted by "pandette", comprising a total of 360,745 units gathered in 12,528 bundles. The pandette were compiled in the 20th century, and are identified with the name of the compiler or another designation. Adriano Zeni arranged and described a part of this fonds, whose result was a file cabinet with about 25,000 files, each of them indicating the magistrature, the place, the parties involved, the date and a summary of the content with reference to any attached documents.
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(source: Archivio di Stato di Napoli. Banche dati. Processi antichi)
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Administrative / Biographical history
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The history of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli dates back to the French domination when, by royal decree of December 22, 1808, Joachim Murat established the Archivio Generale del Regno, with the aim of gathering the documents of Napolitan magistratures prior to the Napoleonic occupation. After the Bourbon Restoration of 1815, the archive was renamed Grande Archivio di Napoli, and, in 1845, it was transferred from its original headquarters of Castelcapuano to the old monastery of SS. Severino e Sossio.
After the Unification of Italy, the archive experienced a significant increase in its documentary heritage since it incorporated fonds of suppressed ministries and their dependent bodies, including a total of 62 archives.
The first director after the Unification was the economist and journalist Francesco Trinchera, who coordinated the edition of the Relazione degli archivi napoletani (1872), a systematic guide of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli's collections. Years later, the director Eugenio Casanova (1907-1915) composed an archival manual and an extensive inventory of the archive, published in 1910. Under the direction of Riccardo Filangieri di Candida (1934-1956), an effort was undertaken in order to acquire through purchase, deposit or donation, the archives of the Neapolitan noble families. This effort coincided with one of the most tragic moments of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, when its collections were seriously damaged by the bombings in 1943. After the Second World War, the acquisition policy of the Archivio di Stato continued. In 1951, it purchased the Archivio Borbone (Bourbon archive), integrating the documentation of the Royal House that had been partially destroyed in 1943.
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(source: Beni Culturali: Archivio di Stato di Napoli)
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Author of the description
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Carla Vieira, 2022
