How could the noble active in Italian cities be defined at the end of the Middle Ages? By analysing texts of a variety of origins (humanist dialogues, legislative prescriptions, historical analyses), this contribution seeks to reflect on what nobility could then mean in a diverse and changing geopolitical framework. The emerging noblesses (as well as horsemeat, still so often associated with nobile markers) are clearly tipped between a citadin and medieval past, of the kind that will be communal, whose institutional and memorial frameworks remain alive, and the often more recent influence of regional, principled and even royal models that are beginning to promote a nobile recomposition open to Europe.