Protoindustria e città nell’Italia interna. Produzioni, reti, territori

Proto-industry and towns in internal Italy. Productions, networks, territories. The essay introduces the monographic issue of “Storia urbana” on Proto-industry and cities in internal Italy, through which we intend to deepen the relationship between productive settlements and towns during the early modern and modern period, both through a general reflection on the phenomenon of proto-industry, and through the identification of some specific case studies. The main objective is to verify, under different profiles, the weight that proto-industrial sites and production processes have exerted in the long term on the structures and balances of cities. The focus of the analysis is the role played by the various actors involved in the processes of manipulation of the urban space for production purposes and the effects that the manufactures have provoked on a demographic, social and economic level. In these multiple directions of investigation, the distinction between cities, small towns and settlements of modest size placed in contexts with a strong rural character assumes a particular meaning, since it allows to read also the greater or lesser “dependence” of the different dimensions of urban space from manufacturing activities and vice versa. The relationship between human settlements and work activities can give rise to organizations that exhaust their value within each individual town, or define more complex and articulated systems, which develop links, reticular structures and hierarchies within larger territorial spaces.