antenati 6.0

Download data from the Portale Antenati, the italian state genealogy archive

antenati

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 any archive at the same time, without any human action. Just launch the script and have a coffee while it downloads all the stuff for you.

GUI version

Just get the executable from the release artifacts, and have fun!

Example:

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://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua19944535/w9DWR8x

Copy the link to the first page, and paste it in the Archive URL field of the window. Then, specify a destination folder: the results will be placed there, in a new subfolder named archivio-di-stato-di-lucca-stato-civile-napoleonico-viareggio-1807-nati-19944549.

CLI version

Requirements

The software is written in Python 3 and requires Python 3.10 or newer. On Windows the version on the Microsoft Store is fine, on Linux use your distribution package manager.

Install

From a checkout of this repository:

pip install .

This installs an antenati command on your PATH (and an antenati-gui one for the GUI).

Run

To download the images of a gallery, pass the URL of the gallery page:

antenati <URL of the album>

You can also invoke the package directly without installing the script:

python3 -m antenati <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:

antenati -h

Example:

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://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua19944535/w9DWR8x

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

antenati https://antenati.cultura.gov.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.

To include the archive and image IDs in the saved file names (e.g. pag-1+an_ua19944535+w9DWR8x.jpg instead of pag-1.jpg), add the -d/--descriptive-names flag.

AWS WAF challenge

Outside Italy, the Portale Antenati gallery pages are often protected by an AWS WAF challenge that this tool cannot solve, and the download fails with an AWS WAF challenge cannot be bypassed error (see #25). The IIIF manifest and the images themselves are not behind the WAF, so you can work around it:

1. open the gallery page in your browser;
2. copy the IIIF manifest link at the bottom of the left side panel (it looks like https://dam-antenati.cultura.gov.it/antenati/containers/.../manifest);
3. pass that URL to the tool (both CLI and GUI) instead of the gallery page URL.