Lecce as an Invisible Salon: Power and Power elites in a Souther Italian City

The paper deals with the transformation of power at the local level, by making reference to Lecce, a middle city in the South of Italy (Salento), as a case study. The authors draw their empirical material from a wider sociological research on the same topic they have edited in 2014 (Cremonesini, Cristante, Longo 2014) and try to sketch how the crisis of traditional political parties has produced a renewed vitality of relational networks, yet by now unable to define a common strategy and to share common values and a common strategic project for city policies.