This paper is not intended as a review, but rather as a set of reflections stimulated by Lorenzo Tabarrini’s volume Estate Management around Florence and Lucca 1000-1250. In particular, it aims to highlight some new methodological and interpretative achievements that emerge from the book, and to suggest some possible research avenues for the future. Among the questions on which there is still room for further investigation is that of the relationship between the “great transformation” in the countryside and the “commercial revolution” that the city of Lucca experienced in exactly the same decades.

Koselleck’s studies on memory and the politics of commemoration have received wide international attention. Although since the 1990s he increasingly addressed these issues, he never developed a specific theory of memory. This article aims to examine in detail Koselleck’s interpretation of historical memory, analyzing closely its relationship with the concept of experience; and then to consider the transition from the individual to the collective level, which is much more difficult to delineate in the scholar’s writings. Finally, attention will be directed to the connection between Koselleck’s theoretical debates and his political interventions.

This article examines the evolution of the geographical concept of Italy from the Greek perspective between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, a crucial period in the transition toward the Roman definition. Challenging the idea of a Hellenic conception rigidly limited to Southern Italy, the analysis demonstrates how Greeks, especially Italiotes, contributed to extending the boundaries beyond the southern area, progressively including Campania, Southern Latium, and possibly territories on the Adriatic coast up to cities like Spina. This conceptual fluidity wasn't due to geographical imprecision, but reflected the intense interactions between the Greek world and Italic populations.

The introduction to the dossier The Multiple “Italian” Identities Before the Unification of Italy briefly outlines the historiographical framework on the themes of national and ethnic identities developed over the last forty years, within which the essays published in the dossier are inserted.

This article is a reply to the observations made by Alma Poloni and Enrico Faini on my book Estate Management around Florence and Lucca, 1000-1250. The two scholars have discussed some pressing issues, which sit at the centre of current historiographical debates. The relationship between demographic growth and economic expansion, the spread of credit-debt relations, the development of the manufacturing sector, its links with the increase of seigneurial demand, the characteristics and the evolution of peasant economy – all these problems should be addressed in order to renovate the research into the economic history of the central Middle Ages.