ABSTRACT
To the visitor Tuscan—or indeed Italian—villages may be assumed to be similar; and certainly the social mobility researcher analysing a national survey is unlikely to be interested by differences between them. In both villages, then, the local world view distils the moral of the story. And at the same time the circulation of this view has a practical influence on the shaping of local development: the history becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like a fly-wheel, the local world view absorbs the evil or the good of the past, projecting them back in the day's events. These local reconstructions of the past not only played important roles in making things go as they did; they can also have an impact on the professional historian's account too. Usually the social historian who 'reconstructs' a completely extinct past from traditional records finds several causes for change.
