Textual Records

The textual records conserved in the Historical Archives comprise all the documents produced, received or acquired by the Bank that are to be permanently conserved and made available for public consultation.

The textual records are now arranged in 37 fonds. The most important is the Banca d'Italia fonds, itself divided into 247 sub-fonds. Each sub-fonds contains a set of documents produced by a department or unit of the Bank in the exercise of its functions (Supervision, Research, Personnel, Property, etc.), by a branch of the Bank or by a member of the Directorate (or Governing Board). The Bank of Italy fonds also contains papers relating to the governing bodies of the Bank and those of the predecessor institutions Banca di Genova, Banca di Torino and Banca Nazionale nel Regno d'Italia.

Among other fonds held, some are of special importance:

• the fonds of some former institutions or organizations linked to or promoted by the Bank of Italy (Credito Fondiario, Consorzio per sovvenzioni su valori industriali, Ispettorato per la difesa del risparmio e l'esercizio del credito, Ufficio italiano dei cambi, Magazzini Generali di Tripoli, Cassa per la circolazione monetaria della Somalia);
• papers donated to or voluntarily stored with the Archives by some major figures from inside and outside the Bank (Paolo Baffi, Alberto Beneduce, Federico Caffè, Antonio D'Aroma, Alberto De' Stefani, Guido Jung, Donato Menichella, Giovanni Orgera, Guido Rey, Guido Ruta, Bonaldo Stringher);
• such diverse collections as the internal regulations of the Bank, Head Office departmental reports, the statutes, regulations and balance sheets of various Italian and foreign banks and financial and commercial companies, and the annual reports of some of the Bank of Italy's predecessors, the Bank itself and the Credito Fondiario.

The textual records archives of the Bank of Italy, with the exception of fonds of personal papers, have gradually come to be organized on the basis of a traditional subdivision according to type of paper-based support: "Files," which are binders of correspondence sent and received by the Bank, "Letterbooks," which are collections of copies of correspondence starting right from the beginning of the Bank's activities up to 1954 and, lastly, "Registers" of various kinds. All other kinds of paper records (plans, forms, printed volumes) are categorized as "Other".

The Archives' collection is growing steadily. At the end of 2023 it totalled 325,000 archival units, conserved at the Head Office and at the branches' historical archival sections.

In 2012 the archives of Banco di Santo Spirito, a former public bank founded in Rome in 1605, were entrusted to the Historical Archives in the form of a free loan.