"Italian Soundscapes from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century: Rethinking the Urban Scene gathers thirteen chapters offering new perspectives on the historical soundscapes of Italian cities. The volume investigates the complex interactions of noises, sounds, musics, and the spaces where different social and political bodies intermingled. In Italian cities, noises, sounds, and musics helped people situate themselves in space and time and contributed to building identities and communities. To locate the place of music in the physical, social, and political space of Italian cities, the authors problematise musical practices, interpreting them through the concepts of territory, space, representation, and identity. The volume focuses on such issues as the redefinition of urban soundscapes; the reconsideration of musical sources, but also of sources that mention music only occasionally; the interpretation of past sound events through categories established by studies of present-day urban soundscapes; and the function of noises, sounds, and musics in the construction of acoustic communities. The authors adopt perspectives from social history, human geography, historical anthropology, and the economy of culture, as well as those of soundscape studies and urban musicology. The book will interest not only historians of Italian music and cities, then, but also anybody interested in how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities"--