he Orsini, whose prominence in Italian history dates back to the twelfth century, boast three popes, twenty-eight cardinals, and marriages into several ruling houses of Europe. This international conference celebrates the conclusion of a two-year project to catalog the Orsini Family Papers in UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. The Orsini collection at UCLA constitutes a significant portion of the family’s private archive, with documents dating from ca. 1300 to 1950.

The conference will bring together current scholarship on the the Orsini family and encourage the use of this exceptionally rich store of primary material. The sessions will focus on the family and its milieu in the early modern period, addressing such questions as the research potential of baronial archives, the family's political strategies, their artistic patronage, and the role of Orsini women.

It is hoped that this constellation of perspectives will yield a portrait of the family, in context, as a formidable political, economic and social entity, and also as a human one.

The UCLA Library gratefully acknowledges the support of the Steinmetz Family Foundation, whose generous funding of the two-year project to catalog the Orsini Family Papers at UCLA has made this conference and exhibit possible.

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