The Historic Office was instituted in 1853 as Military Office of the General Staff Royal Corps; its aim was to collect, organize and store the military documents of the Sardinian Reign that had to be used for writing the history of the wars and the campaigns.
The archive of the Office was formed with a few documents such as the papers of the 1st War of Independence (1848-1849) and of the Crimean War in 1855-1856 wanted by Cavour.
Over the time, the quantity of the documents has greatly increased reaching about tens of thousands of stored envelops. The Office is continuing to collect diaries, reports and historical memoirs of the Army Corps, making them historical works.
In addition to the paper Archive, there is also the iconographic Archive with its collections of more than 600,000 photos, postcards, 58,000 regiment stamps and calendars, thousands of medals and badges.
Moreover, the Office has got central military Libraries specialized in military studies; they store hundreds of thousands of books, including some "cinquecentine" (books printed in the sixteenth century).