This book examines how the administrative bodies of Amsterdam managed to undertake and complete immense projects in planning history their city from the viewpoints of urban design, infrastructure, water management, logistics, and finance.

This volume enhances our understanding of the various strategies used by early Norman rulers of Sicily and Southern Italy – but above all Roger II of Sicily - to establish authority and cultivate identity in the Mediterranean world.

The thematic frame of this issue is the anthropological notion of liminality, applied both to physical as well as imaginary places of transition in medieval art. The volume is thus dedicated to the phenomenon of the limen, the threshold in medieval culture, understood mainly as a spatial, ritual and temporal category.