The Archive
The Municipal Historical Archives, named after Dino Renier, since 1997 has been located in the former monastery of San Francesco outside the walls, in Campo Guglielmo Marconi in Chioggia, and preserves the patrimony of public acts produced over nearly eight hundred years by the city administration, following its historical and legal conformation from Podestaria to Municipal Congregation to Municipality.
It consists of more than six thousand units including registers (1532), envelopes (3843) and volumes (804), making it the second Historical Archive in the metropolitan area of Venice, second only to the State Archive. Also peculiar are the events that led to the preservation of the records, almost seamless between the first civic statute of 1246 and the acts of the post-World War II: only the period immediately preceding the War of Chioggia, between 1344 and 1381, is vacant due to the looting and fires operated by Genoese troops.
Thus, the Municipal Historical Archives “Dino Renier” represents the seat of knowledge through primary sources, which dozens of researchers drink from every year, especially in the fields of genealogy, town planning, judiciary, law, commerce, cartography. Registry and parish registers, censuses, land registries, indexes of protocol, conditions of tithes, minutes of the Council and Council, rasps, ducal letters, classification holders, maps, wills, parchments contribute in a fascinating way-even after the discarding made by the Superintendence in 1878-to reconstruct the picture of the Clodiense territory and the activities of its inhabitants in the centuries gone by, thanks also to a rich in-house library, including the dissertations sedimented there.
The archive also preserves the aggregate archives of suppressed institutions such as the Ente Comunale di Assistenza, the Ente Nazionale di Assistenza agli Orfani del Lavoro and the Opera Nazionale per Maternità e Infanzia, as well as the criminal and civil judgments pronounced by the Court of Chioggia.
The historical section is divided into partitions: the Ancient Archive (marking A.A.C.) preserves the records produced from 1246 until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. Among the most valuable documents, noteworthy are some illuminated codes with the deliberations of the Major and Minor Council, the attestation of the age (1386) of the clock now located in the bell tower of the church of Sant’Andrea, and the sixteenth-century Mariègole of fishermen, porters and artisans.
Then the modern section, which preserves the documentation of the Provisional Municipality (1797-1798) and that produced during the French and Austrian dominations (1806-1866); the post-unification section (AC-IU), from the annexation of Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy and until after World War II. Finally, the contemporary section (AC-AV), up to the end of the 20th century.
The archive also holds a cartographic fund datable between the second half of the 16th and the end of the 19th century, of which there is an inventory prepared by Paola Tiozzo Netti. The drawing depicting the former praetorian palace, built in 1228 and destroyed by fire in 1817, is notable.
Also available are the inventory of the Ancient Archives, compiled in 1881 by Pietro de Nat and revised in 1978 by Pietro Giorgio Lombardo, Dino de Antoni and Giorgio Boscolo; the inventory of the nineteenth-century section on foreign dominations, compiled by Flavia Fuiano; and the twentieth-century one (AC-IU and AC-AV) compiled by Mario Rosso. There are detailed inventories of the judgments of the Court of Chioggia (compiled by Gina Duse), the aggregate bodies ECA, ENAOLI and ONMI, ducal parchments and those containing deeds between private individuals (15th-18th centuries).
Research room
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Free access from Tuesday to Friday 9 - 12:30
Reservations are suggested by email address
To access the research room, users can apply an application for admission by filling out a form that can be downloaded online or anyway available in the room, upon presentation of an identity document. Archival documents, by legislative provision, are excluded from external lending.
See also
Booking
Send an email request:
We racomended using the booking form and sand it to the address: archivio.storico@chioggia.org
For information call the number:
041 5500911
