ABSTRACT

In the State and City archives there are very usable indices for the names of the notaries whose books are in those collections, with rough dates of the material in the notebooks. Renzo Mosti, in particular, has pointed out that the present state of many of these archives, especially the earlier ones, is chaotic, with sections from one notary's books found scattered among those also containing the deeds of others. Attempts have been made, since the seventeenth century, to reduce the whole archive to order, but it is only now that much progress is being made. In Italy, notaries were equivalent to modern solicitors and, earlier than their English counterparts, must have been involved in the giving of legal advice as well as making legal copies. An important feature of the system was that the notary acted as the keeper of his own archive, so that there was no central deposit for documents of this kind.