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The article aims at exploring how Turin emerged as the first capital of the Italian fashion industry in the inter-war period. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Turin had already a well-established history in the industrial production of clothing. In 1902 and 1911, the city hosted national and international exhibitions that included entire pavilions devoted to illustrating the relationships between fashion and industry. The article focuses on the determinants of the emergence of Turin as a fashion capital during the interwar-period: the establishment of a new technological basis, with the development of the man-made fiber industry in Italy; the birth of new institutions and organizations, such as the Ente Nazionale della Moda and the first truly Italian fashion shows; the emergence of a new market for ready-to-wear clothing and the building of an industrial identity thanks to the first large industrial companies in Italy. During the 1950s and 1960s, while Florence and Rome flourished into the international high fashion scene, Turin was still the main fashion center and hosted SAMIA, the most important trade show in Italy for textile and ready-to-wear clothing. It was only during the 1970s that Turin started to decline in parallel with the emergence of Milan as Italy's new fashion capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy communities (ECs), intended as collective action initiatives in the energy field involving citizens' participation, have been gaining relevance for the past decades as an alternative way to organize the energy chain to challenge the incumbent system. With Europe's recently adopted Clean Energy Package, ECs found a formal recognition by the European Union as potential actors of the transition of the energy system towards a wider and more decentralized use of renewable sources. Although the potential role of ECs in the transition is therefore hardly questionable, a thorough comprehension of the enabling factors that might foster their diffusion and scaling up is still lacking. Through a comparative analysis of the evolutionary trajectories in six EU countries regarding their energy systems, their regulatory frameworks and their historical evolution of ECs, namely through the example of cooperative models, this paper aims at providing some preliminary evidence about the factors and dynamics that seem to have played, and may play, a role in hampering or facilitating EC model diffusion. Attention is therefore specifically paid to three dimensions of analysis referring to: the energy mix and market structure; the institutional and policy landscape; the wider social attitudes towards environmental issues and cooperation among citizens. In addition to providing a wide comparison of different EU countries, the paper shows that the historical evolution pathways have to be carefully taken into account to understand what might trigger ECs exploitation in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]