L’urbain : un entre-deux historiographique. Les villes italiennes à l’époque contemporaine. Parcours de lectures à travers les thèmes de l’historiographie récente

Salvatore Adorno

Abstract

The essay deals with some crucial points in the historiographical discussion about Italian towns. It begins by considering rural society’s ability of resistance and how this resistance has conditioned the historiographical analysis of the relationship between town and country areas. It continues to discuss how the decline of the historiographical model of classical Meridionalism and the rise of the Third Italy model has reawoken historiographical interest in Southern towns and North-eastern Italian middle-sized centres. It proceeds with the explanation of how the dialectics of both the administrative history of the centre and periphery and of the political cultural history of the construction of local identities and the processes of nationalization have given us a key to the understanding of contemporary Italian towns. Finally there is a brief discussion about how Italian historiography has dealt with the relationship between the physical, social, and representative morphology of towns.