ABSTRACT
The concept of states with clearly defined centres of political and economic power and cultural pre-eminence has proved remarkably apt for the study of the ancien régime in Italy.1 In the wider context of modern and early modern Italian history, the acceptance of this concept by scholars has relocated the historical geography of the peninsula away from a tendency to search for the present north/south divide in earlier periods, and made central Assante’s observation that ‘every province had its “South” ’.2 The distinctiveness between the urban and lowland centres of every Italian region from the Alpine and, even more, the Apennine uplands formed the fundamental internal divisions of all the states of Hesperia in the north and centre, as well as in the Kingdom of Naples. This represents the most useful framework for Italian historical geography, at least before the mid-nineteenth century.
