The first part of the course will be devoted to helping students understand the importance of history as a vehicle not only for knowledge but also as a critical and civic tool for living the present in an informed way.

In the second part, an effort will be made to acquaint students with the tools and methods of historians' work, in order to understand what is "behind" the teaching.

The third part of the course will provide a brief but critical and interpretative overview of the most relevant issues in contemporary history, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring, among other things, the links between the historical acceleration of the last two centuries or so and the current times that students find themselves living.

In the fourth part, the two historical categories on which the monographic course is focused will be examined: on the one hand, the "transitions" in the twentieth century from regimes in various forms of dictatorship to democracies (with their specific declinations); on the other hand, the issues related to the "origins" of the new democratic regimes in relation to the previous dictatorial structures. For both categories, the relevant historical problems posed by them will be examined in particular, including: how and to what extent do the state apparatuses "transition" from a dictatorship to a democracy? how do the personnel responsible for operating the state machine behave in the new situation? what strategies, political and institutional choices and compromises are used in these decisive phases of transition? to what extent do the original characteristics of the new democratic state influence its subsequent history?

Finally, in the fifth part of the course, an exemplary historical case will be examined to better understand, in concrete terms, the twentieth-century historical experiences of transitions from dictatorships to democracies and the consequent problems of the always complicated "origins" of new structures that refer to the forms and practices of democracies. The case of Italy, which emerged from Fascism in 1945 and entered its first post-war decades, and thus the origins of the current Republic in which we live, will be focused on.

Using a comparative method, the similarities and differences of the Italian case will be highlighted with respect to the events of other transitions in twentieth-century Europe (German from Nazism to democracy, from 1945; Spanish from Francoism, after 1975; some countries of the communist bloc, after 1989).

Please note that non-attending students and students who are required to undertake 9 CFUs (ECTS) as elective courses must add the study of at least two other essays to the texts in the bibliography [for which see the "reference texts" section].