  The article provides an historical survey of the early contributions on
infinitely divisible distributions starting from the pioneering works of de
Finetti in 1929 up to the canonical forms developed in the thirties by
Kolmogorov, Levy and Khintchine. Particular attention is paid to single out the
personal contributions of the above authors that were published in Italian,
French or Russian during the period 1929-1938. In Appendix we report the
translation from the Russian into English of a fundamental paper by Khintchine
published in Moscow in 1937.
