The regular Historical Linguistics Round Table looks at the transformation of Latin into the Romance languages and its theoretical consequences. The second meeting discussed the specific and exemplary case of the language history of the Italian peninsula and the linguistic and extra-linguistic processes determining the emergence of Italian and its dialect forms. The papers and the final discussion demonstrate not only the joint interest of the participants in this type of research but also the richness and diversity of methods, approaches and findings. The result is a panorama of fundamental issues in language change, which can confidently be expected to provide a stimulus and a point of departure for further studies of this kind.