The article discusses the relations between mobility and ‘citizenship’ in two Italian cities, in the frame of two chronological contexts: early modern Rome and contemporary Turin and Marseille. The article’s aim is twofold: on the one hand, it explores the role of transient individuals in shaping urban space; on the other hand, it discusses individuals’ spatial practices as forms of citadinité and being part of the city. The long-term, interdisciplinary approach that we adopt in the article aims to address the question of settledness/unsettledness in contemporary cities through the prism of urban societies of the past, where citizenship and most of the institutions operated at the scale of the city. The final aim of this article is to ‘reinsert’ the presence of transient inhabitants into the framework of forms of urban belonging and unseat the dichotomy between settled and unsettled, formal and informal, legal and illegal ‘citadins’.