It is planned to include biographical entries on Italians who deserve to be preserved in history and who lived at any time during the long period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the present.

As director of the Treccani, Giovanni Gentile entrusted the task of coordinating the work of drafting to Fortunato Pintor, who was soon joined by Arsenio Frugoni.

It had taken about 15 years to organize a huge index of historical figures from which 40,000 were selected as Italians deserving to be remembered by a separate entry.

In October 2009, following the threatened closure of the work, or reduction to a simplified version that would only be maintained online, the publisher launched an appeal to ensure the continuation according to the strict scholarly criteria that had hitherto characterized the paper version.

In March 2011 a new portal was designed to access the dictionary, in conjunction with the online version of the Treccani Encyclopaedia.