Reference service is available to the general public. For general information about the Library email the Senate Library at bibliotecaminerva@senato.it; for legislative and bibliographic research contact the Joint Parliamentary Library by email at: polobibliotecario@parlamento.it.

To help us reply promptly to your request, please provide your telephone number. Response time may vary depending on the complexity of your request.

Replies may be given in Italian or English.

Rensponses to your research needs are drawn from local and remote printed and electronic sources, mostly from within the Senate Library and relating to the subjects our Library specialises in. Unless the nature of the study requires otherwise, we use Italian-language sources.

This service is not available in August, when the Library is closed to the general public.

You may obtain:

• guidance to online and printed reference material;
• quick reference and queries on the matters in which the Library specialises;
• biographical and bibliographical assistance;
• legislative information and Italian regulatory acts even if not available on databases accessible on the net (see Senate public DBs);
• biographical information on Senators of past parliaments (limited to the Library's own resources; further information may be obtained from the Senate Historical Archives).

You may not obtain:

• bibliographical guidance for dissertations and civil service recruitment tests;
• book gifts;
• book loans;
• copies of books or documents which may be purchased from the Senate Bookshop;
• legal counsel and the like;
• information violating privacy legislation.

Information on Local History

Email: fondispeciali@senato.it

In addition to general bibliographic information, you may obtain information on Italian history from the Library. This service draws from our specialised collections on local history: the Ancient Fund on Local History, the Collection of Mediaeval Charters, the Dalmatian Cippico-Bacotich Bequest.

You may email the Library to get information on:

• statutes and charters of cities, guilds, societies and local government in Italy from the Middle Ages to the present day;
• monographs on the history of individual italian towns, published since the 16th century.

This service will be superseded by an online search engine enabling users to personally retrieve information from such texts.

We may unfortunately not accept requests to search for occurrences of a particular town in the whole body of a broader work.

For other types of queries, please refer to the table below: