The Development of Cities in Italy 1300 - 1861

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution of our paper is that we use various descriptive statistics on individual city size and the city-size distribution as a whole to highlight the main characteristics...