The Catalogue of the Italian spiders is based on all available published scientific information, including data on biogeography, bibliography and taxonomy of all the spider species occurring in Italy. Given the lack of a recapitulatory work on the Italian spider fauna, we firstly aim at assembling a complete and updated bibliography. Data on Italian spiders are scattered in hundreds of scientific papers published through time that we progressively collected in the frame of our project. For the works published before 1940 we refer primarily to Bibliographia Araneorum (Bonnet, 1955-1959) and for later works to the "Catalogue of the Araneae described between 1940 and 1981" (Brignoli, 1983) and to "Advances in spider taxonomy" (Platnick, 1989, 1993, 1998).

For recent works, the reference is the online database "World Spider Catalog".

Moreover, we integrated the list with notes deriving both from our analysis of the references cited in each paper and from an array of personal communications provided by several estimated colleagues.

Our Bibliography of Italian spiders includes all of the publications devoted to Italian spiders found in scientific literature: taxonomical and faunistic works, recapitulatory catalogs, obituaries, biographies of Italian arachnologists etc. We also included works that are not explicitly referring to the Italian spiders, but reporting about species collected in Italy. We did not include in the bibliography the so-called "grey literature" (bachelor and PhD thesis, congress posters and presentations and technical reports). All biospeleological works published before 1985 and included in Brignoli's "Catalog of the Italian cave dwelling spiders" (Brignoli 1972, 1985) are included in the list. Concerning recent biospeleological papers, we included all papers published by arachnologists. Other speleological papers published in local journals reporting data on spiders are being progressively integrated in the list.

In general, we only included data checked by the authors of the publication. However, in a few cases—for example recapitulatory catalogues—we report all species therein included.
So far we included more than 90% of the available references referring to Italian spiders, starting from 1868—the year of publication of the first Catalogues of the Italian spiders by Canestrini and Pavesi—to date. The process of inclusion of the remaining available papers is in progress.

Bonnet P., 1945 - Bibliographia araneorum; analyse methodique de toute la litterature araneologique jusqu‘en 1939. Douladore, Tolouse, 1: 832 pp.

Brignoli P.M. 1972 - Catalogo dei ragni cavernicoli italiani. Quaderni di speleologia. Circolo Speleologico Romano, 1: 5-211

Brignoli, P.M. 1983 - A catalogue of the Araneae described between 1940 and 1981. Manchester University Press, 755 pp.

Brignoli P.M. 1985 - Aggiunte e correzioni al "Catalogo dei ragni cavernicoli italiani". Memorie del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona, 4: 51-64

Canestrini G., Pavesi P., 1868. Araneidi italiani. Atti della Società italiana di Scienze Naturali, Milano 11(3): 738-872

Platnick, N. I. 1989 - Advances in Spider Taxonomy 1981-1987: A Supplement to Brignoli's A Catalogue of the Araneae described between 1940 and 1981. Manchester University Press, 673 pp.

Platnick, N. I. 1993 - Advances in spider taxonomy 1988-1991, with synonymies and transfers 1940-1980. The New York Entomological Society, New York, 846 pp.

Platnick, N. I. 1998 - Advances in spider taxonomy 1992-1995 with redescriptions 1940-1980. New York Entomological Society, New York, 976 pp.