“Reordering documents into an optimal archival system." The Ducal Archive of the Visconti di Modrone and the making of the archivist’s profession in Milan, 19th–20th centuries

Abstract

The essay examines the 19th-century debate between the Milanese school, which promoted the subject-based arrangement of archival fonds – brought to its most radical expression by Luca Peroni – and the so-called historical method, rooted in the Florentine tradition of Bonaini and officially adopted as the standard method for all the archives of the Kingdom of Italy. Within this professional and methodological confrontation, the article situates the discussion on the reordering of aristocratic family archives, focusing on the Ducal Archive of the Visconti di Modrone. From its earliest subject-based arrangement to the complex relocations necessitated by the bombing of Milan during the Second World War, the history of this archive reveals that archives are not static repositories of obsolete records, but dynamic entities shaped by continuous processes of reflection, reassessment, and reordering. Two appendices follow: an unpublished document by Luca Peroni on the “Method to Be Observed in the Arrangement of the Private Archive of an Illustrious Family” (first half of the 19th century), and the results of a survey aimed at assessing the synergies that developed between the State Archives of Milan and the archives of the major Milanese noble families, as well as the extent to which the Peronian method contin­ued to be employed as an official method of archival arrangement.