The description and characterization of the Italian speech database SIVA is given. After a brief review of the available corpora designed for speaker verification task, we introduce the "Speaker Identification and Verification Archives: SIVA", a database that consists actually of more than two thousands calls, collected over the public switched telephone network. A detailed description of speech material, a proposal for an acoustic characterization, and the performances obtained using a speaker verification reference system are presented and discussed herein after.