ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. A richness and complexity erected throughout a deep and long established cultural and socio-economic history, and intrinsically connected with the evolution of its cities. The book focusses on the urban nodes and systems of the Northern shore of the vast territory that Braudel named the 'true Mediterranean' the Southern European socio-cultural landscapes geographically and historically defined by the limits of the olive and fig trees. For centuries the two sides of the Euro-Mediterranean world the Ottoman and Orthodox east and the Catholic west gave rise to deep religious and political clashes. The combination of the long Mediterranean history with the most recent but enduring global processes might show to us that the future of Southern European cities will certainly have to depend and thus to interpret upon its own sociocultural networks, dynamics and cosmopolitan evolution.
