The article pretends to give a short view of the history of Spanish and Latin American studies developed in Italy during the last century. From the first chair, won by Giovanni Maria Bertini in the middle of the Thirties, the text looks over the main Italian scholars devoted to the Hispanic studies, offering an outlook of the slow process that take to the current situation. In this sense, it deserves a main attention both the creation of academic chairs as well as the diffusion work carried on with reviews such as the ground-breaking Quaderni Ibero Amiricani, founded by Bertini in 1946, or many others such as Studi Ispanici, Studi di letteratura Ispano-Americana, o Rassegna Iberistica
