Lucca's Historical Diocesan Archives (ASDLU): Early Middle Ages

Lucca's Historical Diocesan Archives boast an inestimable heritage made of five parchment codices that preserve 13.000 parchments dating back to the 685 A.D: among these parchments 1800 documents are earlier than 1000 A.D. and almost all the documents are original, while more than 150 are original Longobard papers. The Archives preserve documents of irreplaceable, universal historical value with unique information for the political, economic, religious, and cultural history of Italy and of medieval and modern Europe. The information preserved in these papers deal also with important characters of the political and religious life between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, and support the reconstruction of thirteen centuries of political, religious, economic, cultural history of a territory and a community placed in a strategic point in the heart of Europe, along the Francigena Way that connected Canterbury to Rome. Read more about this element on the UNESCO Memory of the World website.