RISULTATI RICERCA

In the last twenty years the regional historiography on Sicily has been more and more critical towards the stereotypes, the myths and the commonplaces which have prevailed in the traditional image of the sicilian history and identity. Always sensitive to the comparison among different regions, it has reinterpreted both the paradigm of the sociocultural and economic uniformity and the rural stereotype. In particular it has the urban history referred, especially in the last years, to the centre-periphery category. The relation between State and society, city and country, second world war and republican age, the history of the mafia, of Sicily in the Mediterranean are the main fields of research which have guided the most recent historiographical progresses, linking the local dimension to the national and international ones.

The essay sketches out a studies’ balance about Apulia. It starts from Einaudi’s volume to more recent surveys and pays particular attention toward new questions of territorial history placed from complex interaction between culture and technology. Apulia’s case represents an interesting laboratory experience: from papery production to the construction of data banks. In this direction one research group of the Universities of Bari, Foggia, Lecce, Catania Naples (Frederick II) have started an interdisciplinary project for the South of Italy: by an articulate informative geo-temporal system, which starts from matured conceptual reflexions about use of space, it purposes to restore the long period territorial modifications and stratifications by the knowledge of the net of inhabitated areas.

The space of Emilia Romagna it has been formed in the centuries but it has found its definition only at the beginning of political unification. It is a history marked from a recurring shatterings, that were the consequences of the different political- institutional heritages. Regional identity has been set up in an open and pluralistic way, without the new political-administrative body undoing the manifold expressions of civic, cultural and historical traditions. In the variety of possible identities (national, regional, local) the case of Emilia Romagna has been enriched with the achievement of a balanced social development model. The historical- administrative synthesis has merged the solid components, deeply-rooted in the traditional and diffuse associationism and in the participation to public life, with the Resistance’s reference and with that development’s model. Democracy of community appears the peculiar trait of regional identity in a long period. It’s a peculiarity in a redifinition way, cause the Welfare’s crisis, but not in a sponging out way.