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Here I analyse three aspects of Italian Positivism during the XIXth century's last decades: the Gran ballo Excelsior, the works of two historians, Gaetano Filangieri and Alfonso Perrella. Excelsior is the mirror of the self-consciousness of Milan, Italian moral city capital, of the identity between the technologic, economic, social progress and the unified Italy. Gaetano Filangieri is the symbol of the continuity between the capital Naples and the future of a European city after Italian Unity. As other southern local historians, Alfonso Perrella lives Italian Unity between disenchantment, Bourbonic nostalgia, defence of the regional Italian pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on origins of the Italian economic dualism dating back to the period of Middle Ages in the book "Birth of the Nation" by Bruno Figliuolo. It mentions circularity of the merchant movement that starts from the places where raw materials are collected, passes through the manufacturing centers and motherland through a dense network of intermediate settlements. It also mentions Tuscans exploit the demand liquidity, but allow everyone to get rich and stimulate local development.

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton is an open and modern work. In this contribution, I analyze Burton's idea of melancholy, the relationship between the classic tradition, contemporary culture and Burton's idea, the structure and rhetoric strategies of Melancholy, Burton's «personal utopia», cure of melancholy, love melancholy. The «similitude dissimilis» of melancholy allows living and explaining the characters of melancholy into the different historical periods. The melancholy as changeable balance between laugh and crying, imagination power and principle of reality is a root of modernity: Burton is a «founder father» of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The intellectual and intimate biography of one of the greatest Italian historians, in an interview granted a few months before his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]