The textual records archive holds all the documents produced, received or acquired by the Bank of Italy that are to be permanently conserved and made available for public consultation.
The collection of textual records is now arranged in 37 fonds. The most important is the Banca d'Italia fonds, itself divided into numerous sub-fonds relating to the different areas of activity of the Bank (Supervision, Research, Human Resources, Property, etc.), to a given Head Office or branch unit, or to a member of the Bank's Governing Board. The Bank of Italy fonds also contains the papers of the Bank's governing bodies and those of its 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 Archive 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 archive of the Bank of Italy (fonds of personal papers excluded) has 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 outgoing correspondence 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 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 Archive in the form of a free loan.
