The DEFI project, based on the collaboration between French and Italian specialists in gender history, labour history, urban history and history of law and family, proposes an interdisciplinary study of the economic roles and labour activities of women in four major cities of early modern Italy: Venice, Florence, Naples, Palermo, which represent different social, economic and political realities. The project intends to enter into dialogue with research on Northern Europe and to question, from a gender history perspective, the model of the ‘Little divergence' proposed by economic historians and recently revisited by research on women's economic activities in the Netherlands in the medieval and early modern periods. It is based on a set of comparable sources in the four cities (archives of welfare institutions and notarial sources, supplemented by city-specific sources) studied for three periods: 1- central decades of the sixteenth century, (reconfiguration of the Italian economy in the context of the beginning of the ‘marginalisation’ of the Mediterranean, development of the luxury industry in Florence and Venice and reorganisation of the ports of Naples and Palermo); 2- central decades of the seventeenth century (epidemics and economic crises); 3- last decades of the eighteenth century, (culmination of a multi-century process of proto-industrial development that calls into question the urban dominance). The databases produced will be made available to the scientific community, in an open access research approach. Research seminars, a doctoral training week, an international conference in France and participation in international symposiums will allow the project's results to be promoted, which will be published in English and French.