The State Archives of Caserta "came into existence", with its current name and a status of regained institutional autonomy, as a result of the Presidential Decree of September 30, 1963, which reorganized all Italian regulations concerning archives. It regained its individuality quite late as an institution that had been functioning as the "Provincial Archives of Terra di Lavoro" since 1818 and that during the fascist era, with the temporary suppression of the province, had been downgraded to a "section" of the State Archives of Naples.
While the laws of the other pre-unification states required the establishment of a single large archive located in the capital, to store all historical documents produced by the state administration, the legislation of the Due Sicilie, adopting the laws of the French period (decree of October 22, 1812), was the only one to foresee the existence of a general archive in every provincial capital. These archives were to receive all documents produced by peripheral state bodies within the province.These documents, once their immediate usefulness in current practices had been exhausted, were deemed worthy of preservation for their historical value. However, the above-mentioned decree was not immediately enforced due to the war events that led to the Restoration (in particular, for Terra di Lavoro, an "Archivist" had been appointed as early as 1814 without entering into the effective exercise of his functions). Then, the request was received in Article 28 of the law of December 12, 1816, and the provincial archives were established and became operational by the law of November 12, 1818 ("Organic Law of the Kingdom's Archives"), which also approved the Regulations. These archives, under the authority of the Intendancies and located in their headquarters or in adjacent buildings, were to collect "the [historical] documents belonging to the old and new Jurisdictions, and to all the Administrations within the province's territory." In practice, one could not speak of a true peripheral administration throughout the 18th century, and, having lost a good part of the relevant documentation during the war events of the French Decade, the administrative documents kept in decentralized locations usually date from the early years of the 19th century (with the exception of what remains of the documentation produced by the royal and baronial courts and other sporadic cases), and the heritage related to the previous centuries is limited, for the most part, to notarial protocols and parchment materials recovered or acquired in other ways.
With these exceptions, the documents kept in these provincial archives can be divided, as to their type, into three fundamental categories: documents related to civil administration, documents related to financial administration and judicial documents. However, in cases where the location of the court was different from the administrative capital of the province, French and Bourbon legislation provided for the creation of a separate "supplementary archive," which, for Terra di Lavoro, was located at the Santa Maria Capua Vetere Court. Only in 1869, with the suppression of the Supplementary Archives, the judicial documents did reunite with the administrative ones in the respective provincial archives. It is worth noting that although Caserta had become the capital of Terra di Lavoro instead of Capua as early as 1819, the headquarters of the provincial archive was relocated from Capua to Caserta only in 1850.
After the unification of Italy, the "provincial" archives of the former Bourbon kingdom were not immediately integrated into the state archival organization but were placed (from 1865) under the respective provincial administrations. The very name of "provincial archives" must have been misleading, although it should have been clear that it circumscribed only territorial competence and had nothing to do with the province as an "Entity." It was only in 1932 that they came under state authority, assuming their current name. However, since the province of Terra di Lavoro had been abolished in the meantime (1927), the Caserta Archive became the "State Archive" only with the reform of '63, remaining subordinate to the State Archives of Naples well beyond the reinstatement of the province itself.
