To realise this “special” issue, and for us it is in the true sense of the word, a call was launched, inviting members to submit proposals on a deliberately wide-ranging theme, relating to recent developments in urban history illustrated through new contributions and research on Italian cities. Subjected to evaluation, the responses selected and now collected in the booklet cover a very wide range of topics. On the whole, they are studies addressed to specific cases, cities or territories, which demonstrate the attempt to apply the changing scale of observation as a heuristic and narrative tool. From this point of view, therefore, the reasoning falls within the sphere of the relationship between local history and general history, placing the individual experience of the single city in relation to collective trends, but it also recalls the intention to know and interpret in a more attentive manner the cultural heritage that the many small and large Italian cities represent. On the other hand, the local dimension has long been recognised as a privileged observation point of far-reaching and long-lasting political, social and cultural structures and phenomena. Far beyond the narrow limits of localism, the local dimension applied to urban history becomes comparative history, with a focus on comparison and with oscillations of scale that open up new research perspectives in the various disciplinary fields.