Abstract

The essay aims to offer an overview of family history studies in Italy over the past twenty years, exploring the following topics in particular: the role played by affections in modulating family logic and the household’s flexibility to adapt in order to increase or optimize economic resources; the forms of assistance that were given to the family and the ways to obtain them, including by legal procedures; the attention paid to siblings and the role of the elderly, which from a historiographical point of view we might define as ‘new’ relatives; and non-biological parental relationships, which is to say the forms of foster care and adoption practiced in modern times.