A tool to download data from the Portale Antenati, the genealogy digital archive maintained by the italian Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali.

Since the website tends to be pretty slow in the evening, we present a script to help the retrieval of the documents for your family tree. The script allows you to download all the images of multiple archive at the same time (launching multiple instance of the script), whithout any human action. Just launch the script, and have a coffee while it downloads all the stuff for you.

The software is written in Python 3 and tested with Python 3.7. On Windows the version on the Microsoft Store is fine, on Linux use your distribution package manager.

Open your preferite terminal and change directory to where you've extracted the content of this repo. Then execute the following commands.

The first time you will have to install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To download the images of a gallery, execute the script passing the URL of a collection you want to download as argument:

python3 antenati.py <URL of the album>

The files will be downloaded to a new folder named as ARCHIVE-PLACE-YEAR-TYPE-ID of the downloaded archive. For more options, see the help:

python3 antenati.py -h

In the website, navigate to the archive you want to download. For example, for the people born in Viareggio in 1807 you should find the page:

https://www.antenati.san.beniculturali.it/ark:/12657/an_ua19944535/w9DWR8x

Then, copy the link to the first page, and call the script with that link as argument:

python3 antenati.py https://www.antenati.san.beniculturali.it/ark:/12657/an_ua19944535/w9DWR8x

The results will be placed in a folder named archivio-di-stato-di-lucca-stato-civile-napoleonico-viareggio-1807-nati-19944549.