Central Salesian Archive

of the Society of St Francis de Sales — the Salesian Society of St John Bosco

The Central Salesian Archive (ASC) in Rome has the task of preserving the relevant documentation of the Salesian Congregation, which has its Central Headquarters in Rome and today some ninety other decentralised seats throughout the world.

Through this portal, part of the heritage held by the historical Archive is progressively made available in digital form, at the service of the Rector Major, the General Council, scholars and researchers.

The archive and its documents, photographs, data and digital resources hand down the memory of the Salesians, of the rectorates and general chapters, of the houses and works, and bear witness to the people, places and events that were protagonists of the Salesian mission over time.

Some figures on the Archive

The documentary heritage is spread across more than a hundred countries (134 as of 2025). The part held locally in the central archive, however, can be estimated in the following orders of magnitude: the catalogue currently holds more than 258,000 records of archival units, concerning documents mainly on paper (40% of them correspondence); the archive boxes containing the archived documentation number about 12,000; those in the intermediate archive number about 2,000, awaiting cataloguing; 500 archive boxes with about 8,180 envelopes contain about 1 million items, including photographs, holy cards and postcards; 230 albums of photographs in various sizes record events and groups of members; there are thousands of glass photographic plates, together with mounted and strip colour slides; hundreds of videocassettes in various formats (Betacam, PAL…); hundreds of DVDs; hundreds of audiocassettes and vinyl records… and music CDs too…; the films on reel number in the hundreds and are deposited at the Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa — Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Ivrea (TO).

For study purposes there are 4,813 microfiches, for a total of 293,000 digitised frames. At present the archive of “born-digital” photographs has not yet been created and made available… and this is the real challenge… (for example, it is estimated that in the first six-year term of the last rectorate the digital photographs to be archived without any being discarded amount to around one million, that is, almost as many as all those deposited from 1861 to today, in about 150 years).

Where to start

Use the menu on the left to explore the Archive (history, sections), the classification scheme (Titolario), the Salesian context and the galleries. To search for documents, images, books, audio and video, use the catalogue search.