Between the 13th and the 15th century, most of the communal cities in Italy experienced forms of authoritarian government or the leadership of a strong personality or powerful family. From these experiences, some cities gradually pulled away from the communal system and ultimately produced a completely new form of power, that of the city lordship ("signoria cittadina"). Others, while preserving parts of the communal system, adopted new techniques of government and progressively changed the rules for participation in political life. The articles collected in this volume examine political experiences in communal Italy of the late Middle Ages, using three different approaches. The first seeks to map the diffusion of these experiences in central and northern Italy in as complete a way as possible; the second, to reconstruct the profile of different categories of lords; the third, to observe the way in which the communal system adjusted to the needs of new systems of government. In response to the old thesis of an Italy divided in two by the opposition between communal cities and lordships, and of a lordship system produced by the crisis of the communal city, this volume proposes the image of a late Medieval Italy that is multifaceted and in constant political effervescence.