n our vast archive, rich in precious manuscripts and rare volumes that we have accumulated in decades of busy life, thanks to the indomitable enthusiasm of our researchers, there are hundreds of thousands of profiles of countless lineages of popular, bourgeois, notable and noble extraction; we look back over their lives every day, joined by a spiritual bond to them and to a world that has now disappeared.

The historic research, called Heraldicum, carried out by the Italian Heraldic Council - Marquis Vittorio Spreti Institute, is subsidiary to genealogy, because it aims to identify, not the blood line, but the origins of a family, going back several centuries and discovering events that sometimes are no longer familiar, but which involved the household, that is a determined group of families of the same stock. Of course this research does not guarantee relationships between people bearing the same surnames; sometimes it is also accompanied by the coat of arms.

Knowing the truth at all costs and with any means is man’s principal aspiration: history is the truth of the past, and if there is a divinatory method able to reveal the secrets of the future with any scientific foundation, that is the meticulous examination of the past. Similar circumstances can favour the occurrence of similar phenomena. From this point of view, historic criticism takes on a positive value.

So there is nothing more natural than that the historiographer should be a scholar in search of truth. In many cases he is an enthusiast who, by mood and moral constitution, always seems to have been preordained.

The seeds of the future lie in past history: if there is a divinatory method able to reveal the secrets of the future with any scientific foundation, that is the meticulous examination of the past, and it is from this point of view that a clear genealogy takes on a positive value and a heredity to be passed on.

All the professional and scientific activity of this branch of the Institute therefore pursues the exclusive aim of helping the cause of reconstructing and recognising the general history of Italian households, towns and cities (Municipal Historia), etc., indirectly contributing to the discovery of our Country’s history.

One thing is certain: we are not doing a job but, in the name of that so much desired truth, we carry out a real mission, in the name of history, sovereign mistress of peoples in the long career of the civil, political and religious institutions of the Peninsula.

In fact, everyone has the right to seek in past centuries traces of something which he have always thought he was, or that he owned, and each has the right to pursue the aim of finding that part of history that belongs to him and which, by consulting public and private archives in a scientific way, can finally be given back to him.