Focus of the Course is on the main topics of general history, both European and non-European, and on the themes of identity in a world increasingly characterized by mutual connections and interdependencies between the components.

The ‘broad view of history’ will be the primary objective of the lessons: themes concerning the role of public institutions and the struggles for power will be taken into consideration and explored in-depth. These themes will include: the decisions of sovereigns and rulers, the organization of society, military and religious conflicts; territorial disputes; political ideologies; but also the orientations of cultural elites and their implications in political and social life in different periods and in different contexts; the plurisecular dynamics and trends and the various conjunctures of the economic system.

Ample consideration will naturally be given to the epochal turning points such as the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, the characteristics of the modern State, the political and economic upheavals of seventeenth-century England, absolutism, the Age of Enlightenment, the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century: the American and the French Revolutions; the industrial revolution and its effects on the entire European continent.
The spirit of positivism; liberal regimes; the reign of the bourgeoisie; the European civil war and the problems of peace; twentieth century European totalitarianisms; world war II; the end of European dominance; post-war politics, economy and culture in Europe; collapse of Soviet communism and rise of new global powers.

These themes will be explored with an eye to maintaining the appropriate balance between the fundamental historical facts, the historiographical discussion, the moment of interpretation and a close analysis of key words and sources.

This part will be completed with the in-depth study of some significant socio-economic and political-institutional topics related to the history of the Kingdom of Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Kingdom was then a dominion of Spain and particularly of the Habsburg dynasty. For this reason it was part of the Italian subsystem and of the broader Spanish imperial system.