ARCHIVIO STORICO ITALIANO. — Florentine journal, founded in 1841, during a period of general revitalization in historical studies, by a Genevan who had already become the promoter of the Antologia, Gian Pietro Vieusseux, at the inspiration of Gino Capponi. The A. had as its principal aim the publication of new «accessiones» to Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, bringing together the testimonies that the various regions of Italy had left to the most glorious centuries of our history. It was not, however, a simple revival of Muratori’s undertaking: alongside the edition of texts, published for the most part in the appendices, the A. also published studies, at times of considerable length, indeed establishing—as the program made clear—as the very foundation of the enterprise «the study of legal history and of the customs prevailing according to time and place», with the aim of revealing «the inner life of States and of peoples», and thus aligning itself with the tendencies of historiography outside Italy. In practice, however, the A. almost never attained the level of general history; rather, both in its texts and in its studies, it became an organ of a specifically local Tuscan character. It reaffirmed this initial character when, after the first twenty years, during which it had been sustained by the personal sacrifice and care of Vieusseux, it became, in 1864, the organ of the R. Deputazione toscana di storia patria, which began its third series, followed thereafter by a fourth (1878 ff.) and a fifth (1888 ff.). From the initial direction of Vieusseux and Capponi, whom the Deputazione replaced with Milanesi, Gelli, and finally Rodolico, the A., over a century of existence, has seen historians and scholars of many generations pass through its pages: from Villari and Tabarrini to Chiappelli and Salvemini, from Anzilotti and Schiaparelli to Panella and those still younger.
BIBLI: F. Baldasseroni and A. Panella, in the volume L'A. S. I. e l'opera cinquantinaria della R. Deputazione toscana di storia patria, Bologna 1916; Gino Capponi e la fondazione dell'A.S.I. Lettere inedite di G. P. Vieusseux, P. Polidori e G. Capponi a C. Cantù, in Riv. Europea, 2 (1876), pp. 30–33; Indice generale dell'A.S.I. (1845–1948), Firenze 1943; A. S. I., 100 (1943), dedicated to the history of the A. Pier Fausto Palumbo