Documents
The Altiero Spinelli Archives have been housed in the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) in Florence since May 1988. Documents have been acquired through successive donations from several sources: the Institute for International Affairs (Istituto Affari Internazionali), the Luciano Bolis Foundation, the Spinelli family, and Virgilio Dastoli, one of Spinelli's closest collaborators.
The documents are filed in 375 folders, numbered from 1 to 375, the first 44 containing Spinelli's writings arranged chronologically by his daughter Diana Spinelli, her assistant and Spinelli himself. In the remaining folders the papers are arranged instead according to a thematic criterion (e.g. AS56: "Political relations between Altiero Spinelli and Amintore Fanfani"). For the first 44 folders (AS 1-44), therefore, an inventory by document of the entire collection already existed. In the course of the examination of the entire Fund it has been possible to ascertain that not all of the documents listed in the original index are actually present while the folders contain others which are not mentioned in that index. These discrepancies have been noted in our catalogue for each record under “comments”. The classification carried out by the Historical Archives of the European Union where the Fund is located consists instead of a generic description of the content of each folder and is based on a subdivision organised by subject matter. This inventory is published on the HAEU's website.
In the indexing activity presented here, each document has been examined and filed as reproduced on microfiches (the usual method for viewing documents at the HAEU); any additional information that may be contained in the paper folders but is not photographed on microfiches is therefore missing. The cataloguing of the documents contained in the Altiero Spinelli Archives was carried out citing succinctly in the data-entry page displayed when the indexing programme opens: document type (correspondence, article, etc.), author, addressee if indicated, date if known and, of course, location so that the original can be retrieved from the archive.
The location is shown in the middle of the page and is composed of: the initials indicating the Altiero Spinelli Archivesf (AS); the number of the folder which contains the document (e.g. AS56); the number of microfiches on which the folder content has been reproduced if more than one has been used (e.g. AS56/1, AS56/2), the document's precise position within the microfiche (e.g. AS56/1 b8). The last two fields (fiche and position) are provided in order to make the retrieval of the document for consultation as easy as possible but do not appear in the official inventory of the HAEU holder and should not be quoted.
In summary, a document can be traced by using the present data base in several ways:
a) by author
b) by selecting a date
c) by typing words that are presumably contained in the document's title
d) by document type (correspondence, note, abstract, etc.)
e) by the document's location
f) by selecting the document's presumed language
g) by typing a few words presumably contained under “comments” or “subject field”
h) by a combination of the above criteria.