“This edited volume . . . may help in filling the large gap . . . in the historical knowledge of urban Europe. There has been just one more project on European small towns carried out in the 1990s by Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit, which dealt with the early modern period. Since then there have not been . . . other explorations that address small towns in Europe in any historical period. Hence my firm conviction that the . . . volume will definitely enforce . . . all-European knowledge about small towns and their role in preservation of the cultural heritage.”

Dobrinka Parusheva, Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria

“From a greater distance it may become more explicit that individual cases testify to a certain marginalization of small towns in the modern period and, on the contrary, to their growing role in the period of globalization, when their wider networking through tourism, the media, and perhaps thanks to a certain saturation of interest in the metropolis, overcomes their historically given provincialism. This book is rich in content, inspiring, and certainly will be interesting for the professional public dealing with issues of history, anthropology, sociology, arts management, tourism, architecture, and urbanism.”

Zdenek Uherek, director of the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences