Land Acquisitions on behalf of Gestione INA-Casa

Although established in 1949 within the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni (INA), the Gestione INA-Casa, also known as the Fanfani Plan – after the then Minister of Labour Amintore Fanfani – operated as an autonomous entity with its own governing bodies: the Executive Committee and the Governing Board. One of the defining features of the Gestione INA-Casa was its commitment to decentralisation, namely the delegation of functions and services to existing public bodies in order to save both time and resources. Owing to this approach and to the close institutional relationship between the two organisations, INA provided the Gestione INA-Casa, under specific agreements, with a range of services, including – but not limited to – the acquisition of land for the construction of workers' housing. Following the dissolution of the Gestione INA-Casa in 1963, INA continued to provide this service for the subsequent ten-year programme of Gestione case per lavoratori (Gescal), which ran from 1963 to 1973.

Responsibility for completing the land acquisition procedures lay with the Institute's regional supervisory offices (Centri Ispettivi), whose primary role was to oversee and support INA's local operational network, namely its General Agencies. The archival records relating to this ancillary activity of the supervisory offices in Lazio and Campania were recovered by the INA Assitalia Historical Archive in 2017 during an inspection of records storage locations. 

The digital inventory of these records is now available on the website, providing general information on the land acquired. Although these files relate to the pre-construction phase, they are invaluable both for identifying INA-Casa buildings – a task that is not always straightforward – and for tracing the contracting subject responsible for the subsequent construction, whether a public body, a government administration, a private company or a housing cooperative. As noted above, while the records originate from the supervisory offices of Lazio and Campania, they also include documentation relating to Umbria, Molise and Basilicata.

The files typically contain a site plan (sometimes of an entire development area), together with related documentation such as cadastral records, declarations, technical reports, land survey reports, possession reports, correspondence, INA internal accounting correspondence, and draft deeds of purchase. Some files also include a preliminary development plan, consisting of a layout showing the proposed arrangement of the buildings, together with details of the contracting authority, the overall budget allocation, the number of rooms planned for the building or buildings to be erected, and the size of the site.

For further information, see: S. CONVERSI, Acquisizioni di aree effettuate dall’INA per conto della Gestione INA-Casa: un caso di recupero archivistico, in «Archivi», XVI, n. 1, 2021, pp. 109-123.