Momigliano and his Critics
This article presents three of Arnaldo Momigliano’s letters in the author’s possession. All concern Momigliano’s responses to criticism, and taken together they show his openness to criticism candidly offered within the context of friendly relations. They also reveal his impatience with indirect, insensitive, or ill informed criticism, as well as certain problems that arose from incomprehension (as in the case of Ronald Syme). The first letter was addressed to the author, the second to Professor Christopher Jones (now at Harvard, formerly at Toronto), and the third to Professor Sir Fergus Millar (Oxford). Jones entrusted the second letter for publication, and a copy of the third was given to the author by Momigliano himself.

Merchants and farming in Rome between the Late Middle Ages and
the Early Modern era 
In the fifteenth century, in the task of revitalising the urban economy, farming in Rome was one of the most important investment sectors for the merchant elite. In this regard, reflections on this aspect aim to underline the role that this sector’s products (meat, cheese, wool) played in projecting trade into the interregional distribution chain. In particular, some previously unpublished documents allow us to piece together the different ways of attending fairs in the Neapolitan Regnum, and the Kingdom’s contribution to the drainage works in the Pontine area.

How a commercial space is built: the Tyrrhenian Sea in the eighteenth century
In the eighteenth century, trade in the Tyrrhenian Sea saw vigorous growth. Along the traffic lanes crossing this sea – those originating from, or ending up in, one of the few marketplaces located on its shores – other traffics connected a multitude of medium and small Tyrrhenian ports, producing a commercial space of relevance both for the players involved and for historians. This essay focuses on the construction process, and on the characters in this space, from the standpoint of its geographical dimensions, trading practices, formal and informal norms, and the complex and multinational institutional framework that «territorialized» the Tyrrhenian Sea in the eighteenth century.

Trade union feminism of the 1970s
This reconstructs the events of trade union feminism, an experience that developed from the early 70s until the threshold of the 80s, representing an original and still little investigated chapter in the more general history of Italian neo-feminism. Using the new sources available today in the archives of feminism, the essay analyzes the forms of contamination and mutual interchange between the most widespread practices of the feminist movement (discovery of subjectiveness, self-consciousness, separatism) and the struggles and contractual claims of the workers’ movement, with particular relevance to working hours and conditions. Several of the corsi 150 ore delle donne, or «women’s 150-hour courses», provided for by the national collective bargaining agreement of metalworkers signed in the spring of 1973, are described and analyzed. The main topics of the courses, which were organized throughout Italian national territory, were female sexuality, motherhood, abortion, and health at the workplace.

Economic policy in Italy during the Christian Democrat era
The article begins by investigating the reasons for 1994’s demise of the Christian
Democratic Party (Dc), in a manner much less dramatic than that which led to the
disappearance of the Italian Socialist Party (Psi). The author fully sets out the reasons of economic culture that enabled the Italian economy’s sustained growth during the fifteen years from 1947 to 1962, when the country was able to adopt a growth model based on opening to international markets, budget discipline, low inflation, and widespread wage moderation. Beginning in 1962, also in connection with the Psi’s entry into the government, the development model began to change, with the implementation of some «reforms» (including the nationalisation of the electricity industry) aimed at promoting equality rather than growth. At the same time, the constraints on development progressively increased and economic policy was influenced by such short-term events as the start of a negative phase in the business cycle, the two oil shocks, the attacks of the Red Brigades, the influences coming from European commitments, the explosion of public debt, and the lira’s many devaluations against the mark. Italian economic policy thus faced many constraints that the Dc was unable to manage with its own strategy. This is the ultimate reason why the party entered a prolonged period of difficulty in its political initiative, which was then to evolve into a full-scale crisis.

Which economic historiography? Notes on Depressioni
The theses on the depression of the 1880s expressed in the author’s Depressioni are restated and enriched with new pieces of evidence. Sources bear strong witness to the fundamental role of the demand for growth. Fenoaltea’s denial of a depression in the late nineteenth century and objections to Depressioni are rejected; they do not dis-criminate, and are contradicted by major elements. Federico’s new estimates on an ever growing agricultural production (and added value) during the depression are criticized: the estimates are based on untested assumptions, on an imperfect relationship between dependent and independent variables, and on an unsound proxy for the independent variable, and differ radically from what sources witnessed. A similar estimation procedure can be found in Fenoaltea’s work. This stream of economic historiography leads to the danger of writing a subjective history that substitutes highly subjective estimates for evidence, and of disseminating flawed historical data.

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