The Portale degli Antenati was designed to be the largest Italian national database of birth, death and marriage records. The project involved the re-engineering of the existing portal and the creation of an advanced document management and consultation system.

The portal includes functions for performing detailed searches according to year and navigation tools to explore the archives using an interactive map, facilitating the retrieval, accessing and consultation of historical documents of interest.

The search system makes it possible to view digital reproductions of civil records (birth, death and marriage records; conscription records, conscription rolls) as well as other genealogical and personal records. It also provides information on useful documents for genealogical, personal, and family and individual history research, as well as demographics and social history.

The portal is developed on metaFAD software (version 2.0) and optimised to support the EAD3 format and to import from SIAS and SIUSA, the information systems of the archival superintendencies.