Italian Cadastres with information about landowners

Cadastres allow us to find which our ancestors’ properties were.  Regarding that they also contributed taxes for their territorial property, their furniture and all what they consumed.

Catasto Onciario (In Southern Italy before 1800)- Until mid-18th century the ancient catasti were evaluations of the possessions of the citizens and the revenue of their activities, to establish the amount of taxes due and this kind of fiscal levy was called “battaglione”.

However, it was possible for the Universitates (the municipalities) to pay taxes with a simpler method, called “gabella” which was basically a tax on consumer goods. For this reason only a minority of municipalities, until 1740, chose to pay taxes with the “battaglione” method, and for many places there are no ancient catasti.

Rivelli is an old Italian term meaning declarations and refers to records where a head of a household would declare or reveal the precise extent and nature of his or her property for the purpose of calculating a tax paid to a local prince and can also be considered tax records.

The record contains the name of the head of household, their age, the names of their father and mother, whether the father is alive, the name of the wife, the names of the children, the ages of the male children and a detailed description of the personal property (beni mobili) and real estate (beni immobili) held. The records are found in Sicily and recently many of them have been microfilmed and digitized by FamilySearch.

The years the census was taken were sporadic. The most recent was 1757/8, then 1747/8, 1714, 1681/2, and finally 1636 and 1623. The records are hand written in Italian and are usually indexed at the beginning by first name.

Old Italian Cadastres online

There are countless cadastres, and indexation projects are being considered, like digitizing or microfilming, what could make easier our consult.

This is a list of books of some landlords, from Italian Cadastres, available for consultation online. Given the importance of these documents, their information richness, and their antiquity, a list of published books was added, with information about landowners (informazione anagrafica) and other cadastral registers.

Visit our directory of digitized Italian records. It includes parish censuses (stati delle anime, “state of souls”), civil censuses (population, housing, censimento), and property/cadastral records containing personal information about owners—all available to consult online.