The Evolution of the State and Economy in the Modern Age as Premises of Contemporary Geopolitics. – The main institutional and economic phenomena that emerged in the Modern Age and that favored the subsequent birth of geopolitics in the 19th and 20th centuries are the following: the transition from the patrimonial dynastic State to the absolute State, the birth of political borders and related cartography, religious wars and their overcoming, the challenge of the Ottoman Empire to Europe, geographical discoveries, the capitalist organization of the world. These phenomena gave rise to a territorialist geopolitical thought in the Age of Imperialism, more sensitive, that is, to the political-military appropriation of the world than to the cultural, commercial and financial control of territories.

Geopolitics of Early Modern Age. Global Lines, Territorial Power, and Geographical Uncertainty. – This article explores the origins of geopolitics in the early modern period (16th-17th centuries), demonstrating how three key elements – the establishment of global lines, the relationship between state power and territoriality, and geographical uncertainty – shaped both the politics of the era and contemporary geopolitical thought. Through the analysis of cartographic sources (e.g., the Cantino Planisphere, 1502), treaties (Tordesillas, Cateau-Cambrésis), and theoretical works (Schmitt, Bo-tero, Machiavelli), it argues that: global lines codified the division of the world into spheres of influence, foreshadowing bipolar or multipolar logics; political territoriality emerged forcefully, crystallizing in national borders and the principle of sovereignty (Westphalia), despite simultaneous global expansion; geographical uncertainty, stemming from discrepancies between maps and reality, became a defining feature of geopolitics, with echoes in today’s crisis of international orders. The article thus reinterprets the roots of geopolitics, locating them not in the 19th century but in the crucible of early modernity, with implications for understanding contemporary power dynamics.

Geographers and cartographers from Sicily between the 16th and 19th centuries. – The study aims to analyze the development of geo-cartographic culture in Sicily between the 16th and 19th centuries in relation to the evolution of geographical studies in Europe induced by the progress of scientific knowledge and the discovery of new territories, the result of great geographical explorations.
After a brief examination of the affirmation of Geography between the Renaissance and the modern age in the various European countries and in Italy, the study will proceed in the delineation of the development of geo-cartographic culture in Sicily through the examination of the production of Sicilian geographers and cartographers, certainly minors and often misunderstood, active on the island between the 16th and 19th centuries, trying to grasp the most significant aspects in relation to the various events which, over time, have conditioned the island’s culture.
They are often exponents of the local aristocracy and of the clerical class open to culture and relationships with scholars from other countries who, acknowledging scientific progress, devoted themselves to geographical studies and elaborated cartographic surveys no less significant than those produced outside the Isola, certainly stimulated by the desire to know the peculiarities of the island in different historical moments, but sometimes by the need to study and graphically represent the changes induced on the land structure by natural events, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and plagues, or by episodes of war that exploded between the various political forces which tended to impose their power on the island.

The “Global ’68” of the Students. An Introductory Historiographical Survey. – The article highlights the historiographical issue represented by the planetary character of the youth movements that operated around 1968 in the Western world, in the Socialist world and in the developing countries. The wave of student protest is therefore considered as a phenomenon of global history, and presented in its various aspects in the light of the historiographical debate developed in the context of the Global History current. Particular attention is given to the problem of periodization and to the comparison between political, social and cultural history. 1968 emerges as a great watershed of the second post-war period, which acts as a hinge between the first globalization of Bretton Woods (the so-called Golden Age) and the new scenarios of postindustrial modernity.