This volume collects the proceedings of a conference held at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento from 13 to 15 October 2022, as part of the initiatives of the PRIN 2017 project Ruling in hard times. Patterns of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy. Based on an analysis of the lexicon of sources and some case studies, the essays collected here intend to reconstruct the forms of political and social prominence and the networks that connected - or opposed - those who, at different levels, exercised forms of power and control over people and territories. The aim of the book is to reveal the web that linked the different levels of elites in the age of Lothar, a web that has often remained invisible.