Storia locale, Storia globale: dimensione, scale e interazioni. La città del principe Local History, Global History: Dimensions, Scales, and Interactions. The City of the Prince

The local dimension has long been recognised as a privileged vantage point for observing political, social and cultural structures and phenomena of broad scope and long duration, well beyond the narrow limits of localism or the evocation of nostalgic images of the past, of identity rhetoric. Due to its ability to highlight networks of relationships starting from the homogeneity that binds the city to the territory, leading it back to other networks and other places, the local dimension applied to urban history becomes comparative history, with a focus on comparison and with fluctuations of scale that create new educational and research perspectives. In the age of globalisation, it seems useful to question the validity of some historiographical paradigms by redefining the relationships between general/global history and local/peripheral history: how does the individual experience of a single city relate to great collective trends? Does it still make sense in a global context to use oscillations of scale, the balance between micro and macro or between local history and general history as tools for researching and interpreting of cities? Beyond the traditional dichotomy of local/peripheral versus general/central, is it possible to identify a point of origin in the global city of topics, concepts and tools such as polycentrism and multiculturalism, but at the same time a place of history and different traditions ready to accept the potential of new digital technologies? Taking up some of the issues proposed during macrosession C – Local history, global history: dimensions, scales and interactions, this session sought to discuss some case studies from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary age. Engaged in various ways over the last two decades in the study of cities shaped by the mind of a prince, the editors proposed a broad reflection urging participants to discuss how, in what manner and to what extent this historiographical category (the city of the prince) could be used as a key to understanding the processes of urban transformation, useful not only for historians of institutions but also for those involved in the history of architecture and the built city