Modernità alla francese. La costruzione dello Stato italico (Repubblica Cisalpina, Repubblica Italiana, Regno d’Italia)

The essay traces the political and institutional transformations in the state with Milan as its capital, during the Napoleonic age, between 1796 and 1814 (Cisalpine Republic, Italian Republic, Kingdom of Italy) with a focus on the administrative rationalization of the territory to verify the adaptation of the French legal model to the Italian space (in an overall cultural and spatial turn). The Napoleonic regime transformed the national space, organizing it into a hierarchical scale of internal articulations to widely control people, communities, resources. But to quickly implement its spatial administrative and financial policies, the government is forced to recognize the central role of Italy's many cities, a long-standing character in the peninsula.