VIEW COMPLETE TEXT.
Archive librarian: Dr. Susan Scott
Opening hours:
Lunedì
Monday only, 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.; 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Closed the entire month of August and from 13 December to 15 January
Download Request Form to consult the archives

The archives of the Opera della Metropolitana hold the documents produced and collected by this institution in the course of its many centuries of history. The account books - which start in the third decade of the fourteenth century - are more or less completely preserved from the second half of the fourteenth century, while the records of the deliberations and resolutions of the Opera administration, fairly spotty for the fifteenth century, are reasonably continuous from the Renaissance onwards. The same is true for the correspondence. The archives also contain musical scores and other material of interest to music historians; however, the Opera lacks an analytic index of this material. Also preserved here are various "aggregated archives," which came into the collection from civic and ecclesiastical sources as well as from individual and family legacies. About one-hundred loose parchments (dating from 1085 on) are in the archives, although the greatest part of the earliest documents (about 1,600 parchments dated as early as the year A.D. 1000) are on deposit in the Archivio di Stato di Siena; the eleventh- and twelfth-century parchments (numbering more than one-hundred pieces) have been published in Carte dell'Archivio di Stato di Siena. Opera Metropolitana (1000-1200), edited by A. Ghignoli (Siena, Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 1994). The archives in the Opera della Metropolitana have been analyzed and catalogued by Prof. Stefano Moscadelli in L'archivio dell'Opera della Metropolitana, published as the first volume of the series Die Kirchen von Siena (Munich, Bruckmann, 1995). The history of the Opera della Metropolitana in the Middle Ages, especially concerning its dimension as an institution, has been reconstructed using mainly the material preserved in the archives by A. Giorgi and S. Moscadelli in "Quod omnes cerei ad opus deveniant. Il finanziamento dell'Opera del duomo di Siena nei secoli XIII e XIV, Nuova Rivista Storica, LXXXV (2001), pp. 489-584, and in "L'opera di S. Maria di Siena tra XII e XIII secolo," in Chiesa e vita religiosa a Siena dalle origini al grande giubileo, papers presented at the study symposium in Siena, 25-27 October 2000, edited by A. Mirizio and P. Nardi (Siena, 2002), pp. 77-100.