This review essay is fundamentally devoted to the analysis of the numerous contributions on political history in Italy published after 1945. It focuses attention on some specific actors, problems, and events, particularly the impact of Fascism on postwar Italian politics, the evolution of the Italian Communist party, the role of the Christian Democrats, and the debate on the Italian identity in order to provide an evaluation of the overall evolution of the Italian parliamentary Republic, including its transformation and its incomplete and ongoing political and institutional transition. Although obviously Italian politics was affected by the Cold War in a way that remains difficult to properly assess, I will not deal with foreign policy issues because it is a topic that has its own autonomy and would require a different essay and a different approach. Finally, I will refer the reader essentially to books, with few notable exceptions, and not to articles published in Italian by Italian historians with the aim of conveying the essentials of the historical debate and production, which has been quite intense in Italy. I will make only a few references to foreign historians and even less to works published by sociologists and political scientists, unless they have affected the historical debate. In general, the large number of books devoted to the analysis of Italian history reveals the existence of many unsolved problems concerning the periodization, that is, the identification of different political phases; the evaluation of several factors, for instance, the weight of the past and the type of continuity, if any, with the fascist period; the existence and, if possible, the construction of a common and shared memory, and the transformation of the political system that has characterized Italy in the postwar period.

While the historical debate is undoubtedly quite rich, it has also become considerably politicized, even more so in the past decade or so, due to the bitter and harsh confrontation between two political coalitions: the center-left and the center-right. Since the center-left includes former Communists of all shades and the center-right includes former neofascists, Italian history, its interpretation and its revision, have often been branded as political weapons in order to delegitimize the opponents by pointing to their more or less redoubtable heritage. This confrontation has produced two consequences. First, it is now extremely evident that it has become well-nigh impossible to construct an Italian identity based on shared historical memories. Second, it has also become increasingly difficult to teach Italian history in junior high schools and in high schools without encountering criticisms from local authorities and many of the children’s parents. More than a decade ago, the teaching of “civic education,” substantially devoted to an analysis of the Italian Constitution and the way it was drafted, by which cultural and political forces, in reaction to fascism, following the war of liberation against the Fascists and the Nazis, had become quite controversial. It was often carried out blandly, in an ineffective and simply unexciting manner. Hence, it was quickly dropped. The consequence is that the new generations of students know less about Italian history and, what is worse, that Italian history remains an object of political and cultural controversy, nourished by a what nonprofessional historians called “revisionists.” Though some of their works, especially those by the journalist Giampaolo Pansa, have sold tens of thousands of copies, they do not contain anything that is new and convincingly researched, but present stridently polemical attacks against an idealized view of the Resistance: too little to deserve a full quotation.

Because of the wealth of available material, this review will inevitably be selective, though not idiosyncratic. I will refer readers not only to some important monographs, but to the many studies that provide a comprehensive view of post-1945 Italian history and politics. Though it is difficult to evaluate the weight transmitted by the past to the Italian democratic regime that emerged after 1945, there is no doubt that the issue of how much and which continuity and discontinuity have characterized at least the first phase of the Republic (for most historians up to the mid-1970s) has affected many analyses. However, that issue cannot be formulated and analyzed in a meaningful way without understanding what kind of regime Fascism was and how much importance it had in Italian history. More precisely, Fascism was not just a parenthesis, as in the words of the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. On the contrary, it was the consequence of the victory of several socioeconomic groups and sociocultural features that had been clearly present in the process that led to the unification of Italy in 1861 and was not erased in the subsequent decades.

The monumental five-volume biography of Mussolini, written by Renzo De Felice, amounts, in fact, to an unparalleled study of Fascism, seen from the perspective of il Duce’s career, and contributes more than any other study to the understanding of how much fascism was rooted in the Italian context.Footnote ¹ De Felice’s work has been widely acclaimed, but also much criticized, especially by left-wing scholars, because at times the author seems to be taken with his subject, and because of his controversial use of the concept of political “consensus” that the Italians may have given to the regime in the period following the pacts signed with the Catholic Church in 1929 and leading to the establishment of the empire in 1936. More detailed studies have variously challenged some aspects of De Felice’s thesis, but some have also found some support for it.Footnote ² No authoritarian regime can last for a couple of decades without relying on a combination of active and passive consensus.

Historical studies of Fascism have proliferated, the most significant of them written by De Felice’s student Emilio Gentile, who claims that Fascism did indeed become a totalitarian regime.Footnote ³ Leaving aside the question of the “quantity” of totalitarianism injected into the Italian state by Fascism, it must be stressed that the military organization, the Church, the bureaucracy, the entrepreneurs, and even the monarchy retained significant political power, not exclusively in their respective spheres of action, preventing through their sheer existence the achievement of a fully totalitarian outcome. It may also be of interest to remark that some scholars and politicians have stated that post-1945 Italian partitocrazia, that is, the exaggerated penetration by Italian parties into most socioeconomic and cultural activities, finds some of its roots in the Fascist attempt to control Italian society and culture. This exaggerated interpretation totally overlooks the fact that the Fascist party had no competitor, whereas after 1945 there were free elections and a competitive multiparty system. When analyzing Fascism and its activities, two especially relevant policies deserve attention: the treatment of the Jews and Italian colonialism. In both cases, there may have been in the past an inclination to consider those Italian policies as not very harsh. There are now more serious and documented studies suggesting not only that Fascism was indeed a brutal regime, but also that a streak of anti-Semitism had always existed in Italian political culture. Angelo Del Boca has written many volumes on Italian colonialism. Here I will refer only to his edited book, Le guerre coloniali del fascismo.Footnote ⁴ The definitive study of the conditions of Italian Jews is represented by Renzo De Felice’s Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo.Footnote ⁵

The period between the fall of Fascism (25 July 1943) and the birth of the Republic (technically the product of a referendum held on 2 June 1946) is marked by two extremely significant phenomena: the alleged death of the motherland (patria) and, in neutral terms, the struggle of liberation, or, more precisely, the Resistance movement. As for other controversial events in Italian politics, the terminology used to describe them is bound to reflect the perspective of the different scholars. The idea that when, on 8 September 1943, the Italian monarchy signed the armistice with the Allies, it also signed the death certificate of the motherland has been put forward by Ernesto Galli della Loggia.Footnote ⁶ The premise is that Fascism had “nationalized” the Italian masses, up to then estranged from the liberal state,Footnote ⁷ that is, it had given them a clear role, though subordinate, in the state and had mobilized the entire society. According to the thesis of the death of the patria (or nation), the Resistance produced a political, social, and cultural chasm that would never be bridged or repaired. Of course, the critics of Galli della Loggia’s thesis have retorted that, on the contrary, it had been the responsibility of Fascism to bring the patria to an ignominious and total collapse. The Resistance, first, and the Republic, immediately afterward, were meant to make citizens out of subjects, and it is their merit to have given dignity to the (re)appearance of a democratic nation.

Nevertheless, there is no way of denying that the Resistance, its meaning, and its impact on the post-1945 Republic have come to represent another major object of historical controversy. It is of course impossible to peruse among the great number of studies devoted to the Resistance movement, its actors and their different goals. Two standard references may suffice, both to books written by scholars who were active in the armed struggle: Roberto BattagliaFootnote ⁸ and Guido Quazza.Footnote ⁹ The Resistance has been considered by many historians and politicians the continuation of the Risorgimento, which was positively responsible for the unification of Italy. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the Resistance has been given the positive role of providing the founding myth of the Republic. However, because the Resistance struggle was a phenomenon deployed essentially in Central and Northern Italy (and there was always a large “gray” zone of Italians who were not affected either by their support of or by their opposition to Fascism), from the beginning of the Republic the “myth” of the antifascist Resistance was not widely shared. In recent times, the celebration on 25 April of the liberation of Italy, hence of the “victory” of the Resistance against the Nazi Germany and the Fascists, has become quite controversial and dangerously exploited for partisan purposes.

The complexity of the Resistance struggle and the diversity of the motivations by those who took an active part in this momentous event in Italian history have been beautifully rendered by what is by far the best book written on the subject. Claudio Pavone, in Una guerra civile,Footnote ¹⁰ has provided an articulate portrait of a period, its actors, their motivations, and the consequences. Pavone’s main conclusion, that Italians during the Resistance were in fact waging three quite different, though overlapping, wars—a national liberation war against the Nazis, a civil war against the Fascists, and a class war for the creation of a socialist regime—has been widely discussed and questioned. Especially so on the Communist left, which would like to emphasize the overriding significance of the war of “national liberation” as the historical episode that qualifies and proves their decisive contribution to the shaping of the Italian democratic Republic. On the contrary, especially in the past fifteen years or so, the center-right has, in a certainly exaggerated way, pointed to the nondemocratic and perhaps quasi-totalitarian goals pursued by some sectors of the Communist Resistance, albeit covertly. Synthetically, there were democrats and nondemocrats within the antifascist movement and only the existence of some domestic and international constraints obliged the Communists to behave in a democratic manner. All this said, there appears to be little doubt that the Resistance was more or less consciously lived and interpreted in different ways by its protagonists. For the large majority of those who fought, it was a war of national liberation against the Germans. For some of the participants, especially the Communists, the Resistance was also meant to be a necessary stage in a class war that would lead to the establishment in Italy of a Socialist Republic. Finally, Pavone identifies a third type of struggle: a civil war among Italians. It was fought between the die-hard Fascists, who had installed a puppet regime, supported by the Nazis (the Italian Social Republic, also named Republic of Salò after the location of its headquarters), and all the Resistance fighters who wanted above all to eliminate Fascism.

Many, but by no means all, left-wing historians and politicians have generally shown some diffidence and lack of appreciation for and agreement with Pavone’s overall interpretation. Most of them have been especially inclined to reject the category “civil war.” On the other hand, right-wing historians and politicians were quite happy to use the same category in order to challenge the view that the Resistance had been a truly national struggle in which Italians had fought exclusively to reacquire their lost dignity. As a consequence, the very foundations of the antifascist Italian Republic and its democratic Constitution could be put in question if proved that they derive from a “civil war” whose social, cultural, political consequences had to be mended and transcended. Some have emphasized that no national reconciliation could follow from the emphasis on antifascism; only postfascism can promise less ideological cleavages and conflicts. The lack of consensus in the interpretation of the founding phase of the Italian Republic may go some way to explain why the Italian national identity seems to be rather weak (this is Ernesto Galli della Loggia’s dominant theme as articulated in his essay,Footnote ¹¹ and variously formulated in the more than twenty books that have already appeared in the series he is editing for the publisher Il Mulino), and why several, though not quite successful, attempts have been made to encourage the appearance of “constitutional patriotism.” The complexity of the topic has so far prevented a fully satisfactory treatment. The search for unifying dates and aspects has been conducted in the essays of a useful book edited by Mario Isnenghi.Footnote ¹² Most recently, an appreciable overall view and interpretation has been offered by Manlio Graziano, who has combined in a successful mix historical, sociological, and anthropological contributions.Footnote ¹³

Not to be provocative, but as an Italian citizen I can afford the luxury of stating that, in a way, certain aspects of Mafia have been considered, though in a distorted view, components of the Italian identity. That idea has been accepted and nourished by the weakness and the connivance of some sectors and apparatuses of the Italian state. There are many good books written by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, often not Italian. In my opinion, the two best recent books by Italian historians have been written by Salvatore LupoFootnote ¹⁴ and by Nicola Tranfaglia.Footnote ¹⁵

Whatever their democratic and strategic ambiguities and their political shortcomings, and there have been many, the Communists have never lacked in “constitutional patriotism.” Their positive contribution to the formulation and the approval of a “progressive” Constitution has represented their best title to play a role in the working of Italian democracy. Nevertheless, critics have continuously stressed the fundamental duplicity of the Communist leadership, which was pursuing a moderate strategy in the official political and parliamentary arenas while, at the same time, it was speaking revolutionary words for the consumption of its rank and file. In any case, the most important history of the Communist Party has purposively emphasized the national nature, the national role, and the national goals of the PCI also in order to counteract the opinions and the writings of those maintaining that the Italian Communist line had been at all important turning points decisively dictated by the Soviet Union. Though the five volumes written by Paolo Spriano,Footnote ¹⁶ have been criticized because they seem to offer a sort of “official” and authorized history of the PCI, there is no doubt that they remain a lasting and significant contribution to the analysis of the party and the choices made by its leadership. The series has been completed by two additional volumes written by Renzo MartinelliFootnote ¹⁷ and by Giovanni Gozzini and Renzo Martinelli.Footnote ¹⁸ They may be conveniently and effectively complemented by two important biographies of Palmiro Togliatti (1890–1964), the ruthless and powerful party secretary. The first one, totally unofficial, quite critical, a real breakthrough from many points of view, was written by an Italian journalist, Giorgio Bocca.Footnote ¹⁹ A more scholarly work by Aldo AgostiFootnote ²⁰ is not at all indulgent with the longtime Communist secretary and especially with his often shrewd but subservient attitude toward the Soviet Union and its leaders. However, the most scathing criticisms of the self-claimed “autonomy” of Communist leaders from the choices made and the decisions taken by the Soviet Union and the most damning indictments of the psychological subordination of the Italian Communists to their most powerful Soviet “brothers” have often come from former Communists. A good example is the book by Franco Andreucci.Footnote ²¹ Finally, the autobiography of the incumbent president of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano,Footnote ²² himself a prominent (reformist) Communist leader for forty years, may be of some interest, and not only for historians, because it reflects candidly on all postwar turning points.

Much work has been done on the first phase of the Italian Republic. Leaving aside the many books exploring the conditions in which the Constitution was drafted and approved and the books analyzing the impact of the appearance of the Cold War on the relations between the Communists (allied with the Socialists) and the governments led by the Christian Democrats, it may be interesting to refer readers to some original attempts to throw light on developments otherwise neglected. There is a suggestive book by the Communist historian Paolo Spriano,Footnote ²³ which provides an in-depth report on the hopes and disappointments of Communist intellectuals, culminating in the momentous 1956 events: Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Resorting to a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, public and private, Ennio Di Nolfo has focused on the daily life of the Italians and on their expectations. His two excellent books contain many original insights into the impact of national and international developments on Italian citizens, their fears, their hopes, and their disillusionments.Footnote ²⁴

Comparatively, the dominant Italian party, always in the government and occupying the highest political offices, that is, the Italian Christian Democracy, has received much less attention. However, there is an overall interpretation of the trajectory of the party, of its power, and of its almost sudden disappearance in a book written by Agostino Giovagnoli.Footnote ²⁵ An analysis of the diaspora of the many Christian Democratic fragments after 1994 can be found in few books written by Italian political scientists. The most up to date and best documented is the one by Carlo Baccetti.Footnote ²⁶ Though not a work of history, it constitutes essential reading for those interested in understanding the paths followed by all the Christian Democrats who remained active in politics and their residual political importance. Paradoxically, the fragmentation of the Christian Democratic Party seems to have opened more space to attempts by the Catholic Church to influence all former Christian Democrats still actively engaged in politics. Understandably, this recent development has not yet received systematic attention by Italian historians.

For better and worse, Italian political parties have dominated the post-1945 history of the democratic Republic. Indeed, up to 1992 the term appropriately used to define this peculiar variant of Italian party government was partitocrazia (partycracy). There are several attempts to provide a historical analysis of the evolution of Italian political parties. Leaving aside the contributions by Italian political scientists, who are more often interested in the organization of Italian parties and in the format and dynamics of the party system, the most comprehensive studies are by Giorgio GalliFootnote ²⁷ and by Simona Colarizi.Footnote ²⁸ Unfortunately, there does not exist a satisfactory analysis of party elites. Noteworthy is the absence of such an analysis in a book specifically devoted to the Italian ruling classes edited by Bruno Bongiovanni and Nicola Tranfaglia.Footnote ²⁹ The most influential interpretation of the importance of Italian political parties and of their exaggerated penetration into the economic, social, and cultural spheres has been provided by a famous liberal Catholic historian, Pietro Scoppola.Footnote ³⁰ Largely considered responsible for the declining performance of the sociopolitical system, partitocrazia has, on the one hand, been defended by several historians who have considered it indispensable to the reorganization of Italian democracy, because of the existence of a weak Italian society. On the other hand, partitocrazia has been seriously criticized by some scholars who have considered it a sort of lid put on a growingly effervescent Italian society, at least from the late 1960s on. Of course, the debate has been even more heated and intense among sociologists and political scientists.

It may be of some interest to emphasize that the 1992–94 collapse of the Italian party system can be explained only by the previous weakening of all Italian parties, whose strength had been excessively magnified by the existence of an atomized society and by fragile institutional arrangements. Unfortunately, there is no in-depth study by Italian historians of the political impact and consequences of the Constitution drafted and enacted exactly sixty years ago. Much of the reflections on the Constitution have been left to constitutional experts. Therefore, one must rely on the nuanced and accurate portrait depicted by one of the best professors of constitutional law who also served as president of the Constitutional Court, Livio Paladin.Footnote ³¹ His analysis of the successive and gradual adjustments of some constitutional norms and of the gap between some norms and practical realities is quite revealing of the clashes among political interpretations and reform proposals. Paladin offers many useful insights, especially for scholars who intend to describe the evolution of the Italian political system.

Indeed, in the absence of a precise consideration and analysis of the interplay between parties and institutions (governmental and representative), it will be difficult, almost impossible, to understand the vicissitudes of the history of the Republic. Even more so after the 1993 reform of the electoral law and the quasi-counterreform of 2005. Among the turning points in the history of the Republic, some historians, such as Maria Serena PirettiFootnote ³² and Gaetano Quagliariello,Footnote ³³ have identified the implementation of a poorly drafted electoral reform that would have given a significant majority bonus to the coalition of centrist parties. Approved in 1953, the electoral law misfired. The failure of this particular reform entailed many negative consequences, perhaps the more lasting one being the subsequent difficulty in formulating any reform proposals having to do with the electoral system. Nevertheless, much of the political debate that was started in 1976 and that remains very much alive today has revolved around the need to reform the Constitution and its institutional architecture and to find a way out from an excessive proportionality of the electoral law—so far, to no avail.

The center-left (1962–76), that is, the political phase in which Italian governments were made by Christian Democrats, Socialists, Social Democrats, and Republicans, is almost unanimously considered the most important attempt to reform the Italian socioeconomic system. Indeed, many significant social and economic reforms were implemented by center-left governments, but the overall evaluation is that many expectations were not satisfied. In any case, Italian historians have not probed that period in depth. For instance, in the valuable Storia d’Italia series edited by Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto, the two volumes devoted to La Repubblica1943–1963 do not give any autonomous and significant space to the center-left experience,Footnote ³⁴ which is only slightly more prominent in the otherwise highly documented analysis by Piero Craveri.Footnote ³⁵

On the contrary, there is no dearth of books written on the extremely dramatic period in which Italian democracy was attacked by two types of endogenous terrorist movements: Fascist right-wing terrorism and left-wing terrorism largely dominated by the Red Brigades. It is probably impossible to write a comprehensive history of this complex phenomenon, but a good overview can be found in the book written by Giorgio Galli.Footnote ³⁶ There are also two quite rare examples of analyses based on oral interviews. The first one is by a journalist-turned-politician and by a professional historian (Diego Novelli and Nicola Tranfaglia);Footnote ³⁷ the second one was edited by two sociologists, Raimondo Catanzaro and Luigi Manconi.Footnote ³⁸ Both collections have contributed to a considerable understanding of the political, cultural, and emotional motivations that have led several thousands of youngsters to join the so-called armed struggle. Nevertheless, many historical questions—those, for instance, concerning the roots of both terrorism in the 1943–45 period and its immediate aftermath, and those related to possible international influences on and support of terrorist groups—have not yet found fully satisfactory answers.

As is well known, the most important event produced by left-wing terrorism was the kidnapping and killing by the Red Brigades of the most powerful politician of his time, the several-times prime minister, Christian Democrat Aldo Moro. Understanding this dramatic episode, which has been explored in detail by Agostino Giovagnoli,Footnote ³⁹ the controversial reactions and the inadequate responses by the Italian political class carry extraordinary importance because Moro’s assassination certainly changed the course of Italian politics. In all likelihood, by killing Moro, the Red Brigades succeeded in preventing the implementation of the much-feared historic compromise, as launched by the Communist secretary Enrico Berlinguer, that is, a long-lasting coalition between the DC and the PCI. However, one can also legitimately argue that the terrorists failed dramatically if their goal was in addition and above all to create havoc in the midst of the Italian political class. Finally, if the terrorists’ overriding purpose had also been to show the existence in Italy of truly revolutionary conditions, their failure was abysmal.

Not only did the killing of Moro produce a profound schism within the Red Brigades themselves, but thereafter Italian security forces were quickly and substantially reorganized so much so that in less than five years all the terrorists involved in Moro’s kidnapping and murder had been apprehended and the Red Brigades were in shambles. What had been the highest point of their success also proved to be the beginning of their defeat. In any case, the historic compromise, as formulated and attempted by Enrico Berlinguer, never materialized. Even though most historians maintain that in the end Moro would have rejected any kind of governmental alliance with the Communists, some have written that Moro was highly confident in his ability to wear out and downsize the PCI. As to Berlinguer, he died suddenly and somewhat prematurely in 1984. His death opened a succession crisis that left the PCI confused, divided, and weakened. Regarding his political heritage, most scholars, even those highly sympathetic to him, such as Francesco Barbagallo,Footnote ⁴⁰ have stressed the “morality” of his politics, but some have also emphasized his strategic “rigidity” more than any specific political achievement.

Once the two towering figures of Moro and Berlinguer disappeared from Italian politics, a new (not necessarily better) phase began. Historians remain involved in a tense debate about whether the decade (1982–92) of the pentapartito (that is, the five-party coalition composed of Christian Democrats, Socialists, Social Democrats, Republicans, and Liberals) was a period of growth and positive transformation or a period of waste and corruption that opened the path to the Italian socioeconomic decline, which has been clearly suggested first by Giuseppe Mammarella,Footnote ⁴¹ and then presented in a longer perspective by the same Giuseppe Mammarella and by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti.Footnote ⁴² Be it as it may, there is widespread agreement that the most important phenomenon of the pentapartito period is constituted by the emergence of Socialist Bettino Craxi’s political leadership and by his formidable exercise of power. Leading his rather small party—the PSI polled between 10 percent and 14 percent of the national vote—not only did Craxi succeed in becoming prime minister (1983–87), but, in fact, he also played the role of kingmaker and often the master of all governmental coalitions, national and local, until 1992. While some say that it may be too early to provide a balanced and satisfactory assessment of the eventful decade of the pentapartito, some contemporary historians have indeed produced several interesting and important analyses. Simona Colarizi and Marco Gervasoni have provided a balanced assessment of what was Craxi’s outstanding political trajectory.Footnote ⁴³ From many points of view, but especially in terms of leadership, style, his challenge to the stronger Communists, the energy he devoted to the overhaul and restructuring of the Italian left, and his sheer love of political power, not to mention his resounding defeat, indictment, condemnation, and exile, Bettino Craxi proved to be a towering political personality. Needless to say, the Socialist secretary’s figure and his politics remain not only among historians an object of bitter confrontation and political and intellectual clashes.

It is now time to look at the books that provide an overall interpretation of the post-1945 history of Italy. On the whole, Italian historians appear to share a more or less negative evaluation of the so-called First Republic, especially its second phase. This position is convincingly argued by Silvio Lanaro,Footnote ⁴⁴ whose book was the first to break the mold of somewhat conformist and excessively positive interpretations of all post-1945 developments. Most historians agree that the political trajectory initiated in 1943–45 had come to an end in 1992–94. The concluding chapter of Aurelio Lepre’s Storia della prima repubblica: L’Italia dal 1942 al 1992,Footnote ⁴⁵ is titled “The Sunset of the Republic.” The new edition (1995) chronicles the “difficult problems of an ongoing transition.” Indeed, “transition” has become a catchword, as indicated also by the title of the book by Nicola TranfagliaFootnote ⁴⁶ and by the overall evaluation provided by Simona Colarizi,Footnote ⁴⁷ who writes of a “difficult and confused” phase. Enzo Santarelli’s (Storia critica della Repubblica: L’Italia dal 1945 al 1994) major themes are emergency, continuity, and rupture (or breakdown).Footnote ⁴⁸ Valuable material can also be found in Patrick McCarthy’s The Crisis of the Italian State.Footnote ⁴⁹

Recently, an interesting attempt to provide an overview of different and somewhat conflicting perspectives has been made by Agostino Giovagnoli in a collections of short essays.Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact, what the various Italian contributors have done is to stress one specific element that in their opinion provides the key to an understanding of the evolution of Italy since 1945, its true achievements, and its persistent drawbacks. Hence, it is not surprising to find that some authors (Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Giovanni Sabbatucci) believe that the problem of the Italian Republic is represented by a weak national identity. Other authors (Simona Colarizi and, to a lesser and rather ambiguous extent, Francesco Barbagallo) consider Italian parties responsible for the poor performance of the political system, especially in the last two decades or so. Incidentally, this is also the view articulated by Paolo Pezzino,Footnote ⁵¹ who does not in fact focus on the state but on the “irreversible crisis” of Italian parties. At this point, readers should be made aware of the lack of studies by historians dealing with state institutions, for instance, the bureaucracy. A commendable exception is the book by Guido Melis.Footnote ⁵² Other authors (Ennio Di Nolfo and Sergio Romano) suggest that the Italian “problem” has been the product of the Cold War and of international constraints. Those constraints also figure in Piero Craveri’s interpretation of Italy as a “special” democracy that is not in a position easily to obtain and accept rotation of different parties in the government of the country. Finally, Pietro Scoppola has come to the conclusion that it is indispensable to weave a political ethics around a reformed and updated Constitutional charter. Curiously, a somewhat more optimistic evaluation had been offered by Paul Ginsborg,Footnote ⁵³ who elsewhere has also spoken favorably of a network of “small virtues” that supposedly constitute the texture of Italian society. Though not written by a professional historian, it is appropriate at this point to quote the research of the political scientist Robert D. Putnam for three reasons:Footnote ⁵⁴ first, because it does have a longitudinal perspective that looks deeply into the Italian past in the search for why civic attitudes have or have not appeared when and where, second, because it has had a significant impact on the Italian debate regarding civic attitudes, spirit, and values at the roots of a democracy susceptible to functioning in a decent way; and third, because it identified and documented the civic and cultural cleavage that really exists and persists between, on the one hand, northern and central regions, and, on the other, southern regions.

The convergence toward a shared interpretation by Italian and non-Italian, generally British, historians, especially of the recent developments of Italian history, is confirmed by two books. The first one, Italy Since 1945, edited by Patrick McCarthy, provides a comprehensive account of the social, economic, and political developments experienced by the Italian system.Footnote ⁵⁵ The second one, edited by Stuart Woolf, is devoted to a dense review of the scholarly work by Italian historians, but unfortunately does not include studies published since 2000.Footnote ⁵⁶ On the whole, non-Italian scholars seem to be closer to the Italian analyses, which stress the importance of the Resistance, the Constitution, the reacquired dignity of the nation, and the role of the parties rather than accepting the thesis of the death of the patria and the divisive impact of antifascism. Some of the chapters are also critical of the visible shortcomings of a public ethics in Italian politics.

All these interpretations can also be found in several book-length treatments of what in the first decade of the third millennium appears to be a protracted Italian political and institutional transition. The cherished “Republic of the parties,” as defined by Scoppola, collapsed because Italian parties had become engulfed in a web of corruption and were being challenged from within (by a new political actor: the Northern League) and from the outside (by the constraints and the obligations imposed by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992). Italian parties were never to recover again, in spite of the fact that the precious resource of alternation in the government, always lacking in the past, and as convincingly argued by Massimo L. Salvadori,Footnote ⁵⁷ had finally made its appearance in 1996 in the dynamics of the Italian political system. Afterward, the nature of the competitors and the combination between the relative weakness of Italian associations and a widespread inclination to rely on selfish individualism have prevented any significant improvement in the working of the Italian political system.

By way of conclusion, it is fair to state that the existence of abundant material, generally of good quality, provided by Italian historians on the more important political developments since 1943 is by all means useful to illuminate postwar Italian history. Complemented by few political science monographs, the available studies will allow readers to understand the complexity, the contradictions, the achievements, and the many problems that have shaped the Italian political system and that, to some extent, in spite of many significant transformations, still characterize its troubled dynamics.