ABSTRACT
In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand I issued a law governing archives in 1818: a decree of 29 November 1819 established the General archive of all the banks, both in dissolution and currently existing, and of any other bank that may subsequently be reopened, thereby giving birth to what would eventually become the present-day Banco di Napoli Historical Archives. The Archives contain information and documents on the economic history of Southern Italy and the structure and develop ment of credit institutions operating in the region. P. Aiello, the assiduous scholar and researcher to whom we owe the discovery of a fede di deposito dated 1572, acknowledged with regard to the Historical Archives that ‘no one [could] claim to write comprehensively about credit, banking regulations and the economic history of Italy [without having] studied and explored among its innumerable shelves, which are virgin territory for economists and students of the law’.
