  Through an optical campaign performed at 5 telescopes located in the northern
and the southern hemispheres, plus archival data from two on line sky surveys,
we have obtained optical spectroscopy for 17 counterparts of suspected or
poorly studied hard X-ray emitting active galactic nuclei (AGNs) detected with
Swift/BAT in order to determine or better classify their nature. We find that 7
sources of our sample are Type 1 AGNs, 9 are Type 2 AGNs, and 1 object is an
X-ray bright optically normal galaxy; the redshifts of these objects lie in a
range between 0.012 and 0.286. For all these sources, X-ray data analysis was
also performed to estimate their absorption column and to search for possible
Compton thick candidates. Among our type 2 objects, we did not find any clear
Compton thick AGN, but at least 6 out of 9 of them are highly absorbed (N_H >
10^23 cm^-2), while one does not require intrinsic absorption; i.e., it appears
to be a naked Seyfert 2 galaxy.
