The image of Spain "imperial" between Charles V and Philip IV is still dominated by a "black legend" that identifies it with the fate of economic stagnation, social immobility, religious and political repression. We all remember the seventeenth-century Spanish Milan Don Rodrigo and Count Attilio, we recall the eloquence of the mayor on Manzoni Count-Duke, who is an "old fox", "with his head, with those streets covered with this' his threads theory for everything ". The essays in the volume of Giuseppe Galasso, a leading specialist in the history of Neapolitan and Spanish, are designed specifically to reduce if not reverse this legend, tracing a profile moderately "progressive" of the empire on which - as it was then - never sets on sun.