Among the scholarly celebrations that Italians staged to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas, the Sicilian Society of National History and the Institute of Modern History of the University of Palermo hosted a symposium titled “New World and Mediterranean Region: A Comparison.” The meeting’s purpose was to bring together Latin Americans and Italians to analyze the heritage that Hapsburg Spain left to both Spanish America and southern Italy. Refreshingly, Italian historians seized the opportunity to make positive contributions to the Quincentenary observance instead of engaging in defamation campaigns.

The rationale for regarding the two domains from a common historical perspective is the common heritage shared by America and Italy, according to the Hapsburgs’ imperial designs. Indeed, at the same time that Spain initiated the colonization of the Indies, Spain’s continental interests, tied with those of Austria, projected it into the central Mediterranean region and the Italian peninsula. A concept of empire that reconciled the aims of the Romano-Germanic Empire with those of an imperio de ultramar (the first to appear in modern history) imposed a formidable task on Spanish and Austrian statesmen.

In the process, the Spanish-Austrian occupation of Italy produced unexpected consequences. The medieval perspectives on state and power held by the unified kingdoms of Aragon and Castile came in contact with novel ideas about absolute rule that had evolved in the free states of Italy. At the same time, imperial order demanded common directives. Although they were vassals in Europe, Italians became coadventurers and partners in the Europeanization of the New World.

The 30 essays in this volume celebrate this Italian-Spanish convergence in a generally felicitous manner. Many of the papers are short and concise. Indeed, in cases such as Ruggiero Romano’s brilliant article on the emergence of the modern imperial regime in the Americas, and José Velázquez Delgado’s essay on the application of Tommasso Campanella’s state utopianism in the Jesuit missions, the ideas are so rich as to leave the reader craving for more. On the other hand, shortness does not justify shallowness; some contributions have dubious scholarly value, and others do not belong in this volume at all.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, the organizers of the symposium and editors of this volume deserve recognition for compiling a set of seminal ideas about the Spanish-Italian convergence in the Mediterranean and the Americas. If the execution is not always fortunate, the idea undoubtedly is excellent.