The use of the General Land Registry of Tuscany’s Giornali di Campagna for agricultural studies: an Italian case study applicable to similar documentary sources

Geometric cadastral records based on land parcels are a source that has been used for stud-ies in agrarian and economic history. Given their serial nature, they are particularly suita-ble for processing with GIS (Geographic Information System) applications. Through the vectorization of the cadastral cartographic component (raster), the tabular attributes of the geographic databases created with GIS applications were linked to archival data by means of tabular joins from Excel sheets, making it possible to spatialize the information and un-derstand the interrelations of the phenomena studied at both historical and geographical levels. The use of this type of vector documentation provides a much deeper level of un-derstanding than when more traditional tools are employed.The case study considered here is based on the Giornali di Campagna of sections G-K of Suvereto (province of Livorno) from the Catasto Generale della Toscana (19th centu-ry). The Giornali contain much more information than the records usually used for this type of work and served to help surveyors establish the value of each individual cadastral parcel based on crops and various fiscal deductions. This documentation was almost completely destroyed in several purges and is only partially preserved in some cadastral sec-tions of peripheral archives outside the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.