Interdepartmental Research and Documentation Centre for Twentieth Century History
Piazza del Lino 2
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The Interdepartmental Research and Documentation Centre for Twentieth Century History (CSN) was created in 1998 on the initiative of professors and research workers in the departments of Political Economics and Quantitative Methods, History & Geography, Political and Social Studies, and the Statistics Institute of the University of Pavia. The present director is Giulio Guderzo.
The CSN’s aim is to promote study and research in the fields of science – historical, social and economic. To this end it makes available to teaching staff, researchers and students all types of bibliographical, documentary archive material on the subject. There is special reference to the history of Pavia University, local politics, the Resistence and the socio-political aspects of integration into Europe.
The archives about the History of the University of Pavia are at present being reorganised and registered but the inventory and description of already-organised material are available within the University. These archives are at present in two different places, the State Archives and the University itself.
Documents about the University’s foundation (1361, though there is also material from 1341) up till 1897 were placed , during the sixties, in the State Archives, housed in the former Cistercian monastery of San Maiolo. These are notarised documents, doctorate files (XVI-XVIII centuries), papers about lecturers (XV-XVII centuries), ducal missives and other documents about relations between political, civic and University authorities. As for the University’s structure, the State Archives contain deeds concerning the Chancellor’s Office (1670-1875) and the various Faculties: Law (1772-1869), Theology (1770-1797), Medicine (1655-1890), Philosophy and Letters (1771-1859), Mathematics (1787-1897); Pharmacy (1791-1878). Numerous catalogues and registers of students from 1770 to 1849 have also been preserved.
From this point in time, the University Archives were no longer part of the material deposited in the local governments offices but were housed, in very bad conditions, in the loft space above the main university building. In 1996 some of the fellows in the History & Geography Department recovered the material and provisionally stored it in two large rooms in the Department, which was then in the Dominican monastery of St. Thomas, which had been used as University lecture rooms in medieval times and more recently converted to barracks. After the necessary disinfecting and cleaning operations, the material is being re-housed in appropriate containers, and the various archives from 1822 to 1972 are being checked and inventoried. Most of the documents, however, are actually datable to the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. The inventorying and cataloguing are being done by students on the Heritage Technician Diploma course and used for their diploma theses. (http://dobc.unipv.it/obc/index.htm).
The aim of the Centre for University History is to group both parts of the Archives in one single place – the University – in the very near future.
The archives and documents of the Pavia Institute for the History of the Resistence and Modern Times has already largely been organised and analytically described on the Web at http://dobc.unipv.it/dipstgeo/ipsrec/index.htm.
The research documents on the history of European integration, Federalist movements and the general theory of Federalism are already organised and consultable. The following papers are in this group: Counsel for the Communes and Regions of Europe (CCRE) – photocopies - ; European Federalist Youth (GFE); Celeste Bastianetto (1899-1953) ; Lodovico Benvenuti (1899-1966) - photocopies of the papers concerning 1949-54; Luciano Bolis (1918-1993) ; Nicolò Carandini (1895-1972) - photocopies - ; library source Andrea Chiti Battelli ( ) ; Enzo Giacchero (1912-) – parts concerning 1947-1949 - ; Ivan Matteo Lombardo (1902-1980) - photocopies - ; Mario Alberto Rollier (1909-1980) – parts concerning 1941-1945 - ; Ernesto Rossi (1897-1967) papers - photocopies - ; those Umberto Rossi ( ) papers which concern activity in the CCRE - ; Altiero Spinelli – about the activity of the Italian Committee for Italian Democracy (Cide) - ; Clarence K. Streit (1896-1986) – photocopies of those papers concerning 1920-1946 - ; Guglielmo Usellini ( 1906-1958).
CSN has also undertaken a census of the archives in all the various sections of the University of Pavia. The data are still being collected.