UCLA Library opens its major Orsini family archive to online searching

Following a two-year cataloging and digitization effort, the UCLA Library has opened its extensive archive of the Orsini family, one of the oldest and most prominent clans in Italian history, and has posted a searchable selection of the archive's digitized materials online. 

 

The digitized materials, which now make the collection accessible to students and scholars around the world, can be found at http://digital.library.ucla.edu/orsini.

 

Held in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, the Orsini papers offer a window into the public and private lives of this intrigue-filled family, particularly between the 16th and 19th centuries. Much of the material concerns property administration, including maps, registers, plans, inventories of houses and palaces, appointments of personnel, and reports from estate managers. The archive also contains dowries, wills and legal documents.

 

Not only is the UCLA Orsini archive vast in size, consisting of 572 boxes, but it is also unique among UCLA Library collections in terms of the extensive timeframe it covers — from 1150 to 1950. The archive offers information about a vast range of subject matter, including art, architecture, economics, gender issues and politics, making it "an amazingly rich resource for original scholarship," according to Victoria Steele, head of the library's department of special collections.

 

Among those who worked on the project, Steele credits especially Guendalina Ajello, project archivist and Orsini scholar, "whose energy and whose linguistic, academic and technical skills enabled us to achieve such a successful conclusion."

 

The Rome-based Orsini have been one of Italy’s leading families since the Middle Ages, when they acquired extensive lands across the central and southern parts of the country. Comparable in power and influence to the Medici family, the Orsini produced three popes, 28 cardinals and 33 Roman senators and were crucial players in the complicated power-game of Italian politics during some of the most tumultuous times in the country’s history.

 

The UCLA Library acquired the collection in 1964, but for years it remained little-known and virtually inaccessible because of incomplete cataloging. With the generous support of the Steinmetz Foundation, in 2005, the department of special collections began a project to complete the cataloging of the papers and to digitize selected items.

 

The launch of the online search aid and the digitized images not only makes the papers and images available but also reunites them, in a virtual manner, with the other large corpus of Orsini family papers housed in the Archivio Capitolino in Rome.

 

In February 2007, the department mounted an exhibit and, with support from the Ahmanson Foundation, joined with the UCLA Department of Italian, the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies to organize and host a major international conference. Among the distinguished scholars who showcased new research that drew on the archive were Caroline Murphy, author of the critically acclaimed 2005 book "The Pope’s Daughter," who discussed Orsini women, and Carlo Ginzburg, professor emeritus of history at UCLA, who used evidence unearthed in the papers to expose internal strife within the Roman Catholic Church.

 

The Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, recognized as one of the country's top special collections departments, administers the UCLA Library’s rare and unique materials in the humanities, social sciences and visual arts. Its collections encompass rare books and pamphlets from the 15th through the 20th centuries; extensive manuscript holdings; drawings; early maps and atlases; photographs, prints and paintings; audiotape and videotape recordings; oral history transcripts; postcards; and posters.