The course provides an overview of the historical evolution of the criminal procedures, focusing on some particularly significant topics, such as the political character of criminal procedure (between social protection and rights of individuals, necessity to punish the guilty and to guarantee everyone); the principles ruling the kind of trial in force (secret or publicity, writing or orality, presumption of guilt or presumption of innocence); the rights of the accused (first of all the right to defence); the proof system; the powers of the judge; the role of legislation, law scholars and jurisprudence in the creation of criminal procedure. These topics are studied in some relevant moments connoting the changes of societies during times: the different ways criminal justice was administered in the early Middle Ages (ordeals, duels, oath); the accusatorial system of the medieval Italian communes; the roots of the inquisitorial trial in canon law and in the statutes of the Italian communes; the inquisitorial system of the towns of Lombardy from the 16th to the 18th century; the first European collections of rules about criminal procedure (especially in France and in Germany); the Enlightenment philosophers’ strong criticism against the main features of the inquisitorial procedure (i.e. the legal proof system, secret, torture, the discretionary power of judges, the limits imposed to the defending counsel); the preservation and the improvement of the traditional inquisitorial procedures in the Hapsburg Austria between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century; French changes during the Revolution (the accusatorial trial and the first steps of the jury in continental Europe); France after Thermidor and the so called "mixed procedure" of the Napoleonic Code d’instruction criminelle; the first Code of criminal procedure in Italy after the Unification; the return to the past of the fascist legislation.