The State Archive of Naples was born as the "General Archive of the Kingdom" in 1808.

The first floor of the Monastery of Santi Severino e Sossio , seat of the State Archives of Naples , constitutes the museum area of the State Archives of Naples . The heart of the life of the Institute - in fact , the main study room, the inventory room and the reception room are located - it was also the center of the community for the monks. Its four splendid cloisters marked its rhythms; the Sala del Capitolo, frescoed by Belisario Corenzio in the early 1600s with a complex Christological cycle, was the place for debate and confrontation; the large Refectory , suggestive and imposing, was the heart of the daily life of the monastic community. Here various eras and various functions coexist: the monastery, the nineteenth-century archive, the modern institute of culture.

The visit to the State Archives of Naples is limited today to the rooms on the first floor . The virtual visit, on the other hand, opens the doors of the " Secret Archive ": areas that are not normally accessible, because they are occupied by offices or paper deposits which, despite their intended use, hide beauty - artistic and archival - of no secondary importance. .

The third floor offers Roman relics, nineteenth-century precision instruments, and the oldest "piece" of the Archive, the Lapidary Map , in that characteristic coexistence of documents and monuments that characterizes the monastic complex of Santi Severino in a particular way. and Sossio . On the fourth floor of the Institute, in particular, monumental rooms were located for the conservation of documents: some of these were built in the first half of the nineteenth century. The rooms, not included in the usual itineraries for visits to the Institute, are presented both for the importance of the documentary heritage preserved and for the interesting and various solutions for setting up archive shelving.