Segreteria Generale e fondi diversi

The General Secretariat collection includes surviving BCI documents regarding the bank’s first twenty years in business. This illustrious archive was created in the early 1940s by Oreste Ferrari, a German scholar from the Bank’s Research Department, and consulted by Gino Luzzatto for his great historical portrait of Italy’s post-Unification economy; it was the first in the economic history collection commissioned by Raffaele Mattioli and designed by Federico Chabod (G. LUZZATTO, L’economia italiana dal 1861 al 1914, vol. 1°: 1861-1894, Milan, Banca Commerciale Italiana, 1963 – “Studi e ricerche di Storia economica italiana nell’età del Risorgimento”, 1).

The “General Secretariat” is the original nucleus which eventually gave rise to the bank’s Central Administration and Services. The introduction describes the birth and development of the Central Administration, with an appendix containing the original text of the Règlement de la Direction Centrale et des services à sa dépendance (1908).