Le carte dei re d'Italia tra dispersioni, epurazioni, occultamenti e (parziali) ritrovamenti

In Liberal Italy there was no quarter granted to scholars who wanted to critically use the documentary sources of the House of Savoy, which were preserved at the State Archives of Turin. Moreover, Crispi ordered the concealment of thousands of documents, with the creation of a secret archive, because controversies among historians had been sparked in 1890. Those documents remained hidden in the Royal Library of Turin for fifty years. In 1942, due to bombing, Vittorio Emanuele III ordered them to be transferred to Rome. With the fall of the monarchy the documents of the House of Savoy underwent further dismemberment, a part remaining at the Quirinal Palace; another was brought by Umberto II with him in exile.

The difficult return of the documents to Turin, between the Seventies and Nineties, was a case history that reopened the debate on the role of the dynasty in the history of Italy. The recent inventorying of the royal documents allows us to minutely reconstruct the history of a controversial archive. [Publisher's text].