During their history, spanning in most cases over two centuries, the twelve Italian Astronomical Observatories have accumulated a wealth of documents mainly related to their institutional and scientific life. Those documents, however, are generally not available for consultation, because of the lack of proper inventories. In December 1999, the Ufficio Centrale Beni Archivistici of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali with the cooperation of Società Astronomica Italiana and Consorzio Nazionale per l'Astronomia e l'Astrofisica, have launched a project for the preservation and inventorying of these archives. This paper gives an overview of the state and the contents of the archives, and describes the strategy that is being followed to make the archives available to scholars in the next two years.
(1) Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche ed Astronomiche,
Università di Palermo, Italy
(2) Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera Milano, Italy
HTML version: Wolfgang R. Dick. Created: 11 July 2000. Latest update: 26 July 2000