Cittadella degli Archivi, Municipal archive building in Niguarda district, Milan, Italy.
The Cittadella degli Archivi is a modern archival center on Via Gregorovius 15 in the Niguarda district, housing more than 1.5 million historical and administrative documents. The building uses a robot-assisted system named Eustorgio that automatically retrieves materials and delivers them to reading and scanning areas.
The facility opened to public consultation in March 2015, marking a turning point in how people could access Milan's municipal documents. The installation of the robot-assisted system represented an important advance in how large collections of documents could be stored and managed.
The outer walls display murals created by local artists since 2017, showing important events and places drawn from the documents stored inside. These artworks bring stories from Milan's past to the surface, making visible the history that would otherwise remain hidden in archives.
Visitors can request materials and view them in dedicated reading areas without having to navigate through multiple storage levels themselves. It is helpful to check in advance how to access the documents you want and what advance notice might be needed.
The building has approximately 70 kilometers of linear storage space, making it one of Europe's largest robot-assisted archival facilities. The sheer scale of this storage system makes it possible to preserve documents in ways that traditional archives cannot match.
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