According to Benedetto Croce, all history is contemporary history, by which he means that all serious study of the past is informed by the problems and needs of the writer’s own time; the more conscious historians are of their contemporary motives, the more searching and accurate their investigations of the past and the more useful their reconstructions.¹ Of Croce’s major historical writings, none illustrates this point more clearly than the Storia del regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples).

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce once said, “all history is contemporary history” and written from the point of view of contemporary preoccupations. He states that “contemporary history” usually refers to a near past.