ARCANO – HTR for Conversational Research with the Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli

What if you could have a conversation with 500 years of Italian banking records? ARCANO combines Transkribus transcription with NLP and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to power a research chatbot built on the holdings of the Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli — one of the world's most important early modern financial archives. The result: a new model for interactive, AI-assisted archival research.