Selections from the Orsini Papers
The Orsini Family Papers in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections constitute a significant portion of the private archive of one the oldest and most prominent families in Italian history. The archive consists of 540 boxes of documents dating from 1300 to 1950 and includes several hundred maps and plans of the family's feudal holdings, palaces, and castles.
The digitization project, which coincides with a two-year project to catalog the papers, involves scanning many of the most visually informative and widely used items in the collection. The initial selection includes 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.
