City visions of Italy’s past

The article proposes a synthesis of knowledge that historians have produced on the network of the Italian cities in the communal period; by relying on such a synthesis it draws attention to the strong demographic imbalance - which is at that time also largely functional imbalance - between cities of northern and central Italy and those of southern Italy, especially around the year 1300. However it should be noted that the condition of the Italian urban network, both in the years before 1300 and in the following years, strongly contradicts this snapshot; then the imbalance of that time - even higher than what is commonly imagined - is temporary, although still is revealing. The article concludes by drawing attention to the successive dynamics of the cities and countryside of central Italy, in what they are worth to explain the prominent role that these regions have into global imagination today.