The ®rst aim of this study was to investigate whether demographic characteristics of children (i.e. age, sex, birth order), mothers' psychosocial characteristics (i.e. fear of crime, neighbourhood relations, sense of community, perceived risk of traf®c) and environmental factors (i.e. living in a new/old neighbourhood, in a building with a condominium courtyard, near a park or in a private street) in¯uence the independent urban mobility of 7±12-year-old children. The second aim was to verify whether children who are more independent meet their peers more frequently for indoor and outdoor play. A semi-structured interview, the Italian Sense of Community Scale and a Neighbourhood Relations scale were administered to 251 mothers living in Rome. The results indicated that more independent children are older, male, live in apartment buildings with courtyards, near parks and in new neighbourhoods. Also, their mothers have more neighbourhood relations. Regarding the second aim, it emerged that children who are more independent play more often with their peers, both indoors and outdoors.

Luigi Luciani, the Italian physiologist who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, is generally remembered for his studies on the cerebellum, the physiology of the heart, the respiratory system and on fasting. Less well known is the experimental research he carried out in the field of cerebral localization. It should however be pointed out that, as a result of his work in experimental neurophysiology between the years 1875 and 1885, Luciani was perfectly familiar with the latest findings on the relationship between brain and behavioral functions, but above all he was led by this work to develop an interesting model for the description of brain functions. He refined this model in a close dialectic relationship, of comparison and contrast, with the theories of the leading European neurophysiologists of his time - either those who favored a localizationistic explanation of the brain's functions or those who opposed this view. This paper gives a quick presentation of Luciani's experimental work on the functions of the brain as well as what he thought of the question of cerebral localization. His localizationistic model is compared - both in its general characteristics and in its specific details - with other models which had been proposed during the same years by the outstanding European physiologists of the day like Goltz, Ferrier, and Munk. Luciani's epistemological foundations, as well as his experimental methodology, are analyzed within the context of his wider theoretical ideas about how nervous and psychic activity were linked, with his ideas on physiology, and more in general in relation to his view of man's biological place in the rest of the living world. On the basis of this analysis, the state of the experimental work being done in Italy by Luciani is placed within the European context of neurophysiology in which Luciani was an outstanding figure.

While representing one of the most important developments in the knowledge of the brain, both for its theoretical advances and its medical consequences, the work of David Ferrier met with strong criticism from conservative circles in Victorian society. At the end of 19th century certain British neurologists and neurosurgeons – including Ferrier – faced vehement public attacks by those aristocrats who, under the banner of antivivisectionism and “natural theology”, expressed their fears of the reorganization of medicine into a scientific discipline. The debate that developed in Victorian society after these events led not only to the diffusion of Ferrier’s ideas and public recognition of the advanced neurosurgical practices that stemmed from his work, but also contributed to the affirmation of the medical community in the scientific world of the time.

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