Web Watch
Based in Rome, the Orsini have been one of Italy's leading families since the Middle Ages, when they acquired extensive lands across central and southern Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, their private armies and enormous wealth made them crucial players in the complicated power-game of Italian politics.
Selections are available from the Orsini Family Papers, which are housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. The digitized materials feature some of the most visually informative and widely used items in the collection, including eighty maps and plans as well as two important early texts: a fourteenth-century cardinal's will and a fifteenth-century agreement between the king of Naples and a faction of rebels.
With the generous support of the Steinmetz Foundation, in 2005 the department began a two-year project to complete cataloging the papers and digitize selected items. That project has now been completed, reuniting the papers -- in a virtual manner -- with the remainder of the Orsini archive, which is housed in Rome.
