The introductory session of the symposium Notions of revolution and shifting images of Europe presents some of the theoretical issues involved in the complex relationship between the shifting meaning of the concept of revolution and the way Europe imagined itself from the seventeenth century onwards. The first paper, by Vittorio Dini, interprets the changing meaning of revolution in modern Europe by using interpretative tools offered in the works of authors like Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck and Toni Negri; their theories on the notion of revolution, modernity an dteh acceleration of historical time are used to interpret shifting images of Europe from the English and French Revolution to the crisis of European identity in the 1920s and 1930s. The second and the third papers, connected to one another, are by Pereira da Silva Gama and Neves da Costa Maia. The authors offer a bird’s eye view on the way the idea of Europe developed from the seventeenth century onwards stressing its protean nature and interpreting the changes it underwent through the notions of crisis and revolution as defined by Reinhart Koselleck and taking place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper by Stefania Ecchia offers a comparison between Europe and the Islamic world by considering the industrial revolution as the consequence of the rise of a bourgeois and European mind seemingly absent in the Islamic world. On such premises, she singles out several elements of a specific way in which Europe represented itself. The last of the papers is by Laurie Catteeuw. In it she looks at the notion of revolution by relating and opposing it to the concept of reason of State, stressing how both of were central in shaping the way a European political identity developed in the seventeenth century.