The role that dance halls, cabarets and variety theatres, and cultural imports like the cakewalk, tango and jazz played in the rise of a pan-European and global commercial popular culture, has been addressed either from the perspective of a single city or a comparison between Western and North American metropolises. Thus while London, Berlin, Paris and New York have attracted scholarly attention, less is known about how other European cities like Lisbon, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Athens, Cracow, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm. With this in mind, during the 14^th International Conference on Urban History in Rome a special session will be dedicated to the night time entertainment in Central and Southern Europe. More