Ricerche di storia contemporanea: dove tempo e spazio si incontrano.

This essay aims to contribute – in the valuable interdisciplinary discussion proposed in this issue of the journal – to the debate on the relation with “space” from the point of view of contemporary history. To give some examples we go through various research fields that appear to have contributed significantly to this theme, toward a more complete articulation of historiographical approaches, in the last half century. In particular: Urban history establishing itself as an autonomous area of research since 1970’s and within it the topic of “living in war” still well intense in the deeper investigation on the two World Wars; the series of volumes Regioni in Einaudi’s Storia d’Italia, a corpus of peculiar interest and methodological innovation; the studies on History of agriculture that, starting from a basically quantitative and technical approach to the rural world, opened to new questions, as well as the investigation topics of environmental history; History of Italian emigration stimulated in recent years by emigration phenomena on world scale; urban identities, both a complex and “thick” topic, more than ever a centre of interest, not only for scholars, between conflicts in the “periphery” and projects of “metropolitan areas”. These are all themes that concur to put side by side, as a further category, memory to time and space, for a common ground of analysis.