ITALY.

Italy is a major European country however measured. It is somewhat smaller in size than France, Spain, or united Germany but larger than the United Kingdom, but its population in 2006, numbering slightly less than sixty million, was about the same as that of France or Britain. Economically, although the country's relative status in Europe was decidedly inferior for much of the twentieth century, the growth of Italian wealth since World War II has been spectacular, and while Italian gross domestic product (GDP) varied between 40 and 50 percent of British GDP over the period 1900–1950, by 2006 it was nearly equal to that of Britain (or France). Probably more than any other single factor, that rapid economic growth transformed Italy over the twentieth century. In quantitative terms, more than 40 percent of Italians still worked in a largely traditional agricultural sector following World War II; by 2006 that figure was 5 percent and much Italian farming was highly modernized.

In 1914, then, Italy was one of the poorer and less-developed countries of Europe (not helped by its lack of coal and iron). Most of the workforce was agricultural, and modern industry was largely confined to the recently developed industrial triangle in the northwest (Milan-Turin-Genoa). The division between a more advanced north and more primitive south was well established, and a majority of Italy's massive emigration at the time—it peaked in 1913 at about nine hundred thousand—came from the south. Politically, Italy's constitutional monarchy, inherited from Piedmont at the time of unification in 1860, relied on a small male electorate and remained in the hands of the liberal bourgeois elite, though a significant socialist opposition had developed over the previous two decades. Relations between the state and the Catholic Church (whose secular realm had been taken over by Italy during unification) remained strained though not so much as they had been in previous decades. In a move to assert its status as a great power, Italy had carved Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (later combined as Libya) off the faltering Ottoman Empire in 1911, adding to its earlier colonial holdings in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland (Somalia). Italy had been part of the Triple Alliance together with Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1882.

WORLD WAR I

Although a member of that defensive alliance, Italy was not officially informed about Austria's attack on Serbia and was unprepared for the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Initially Italy opted for neutrality, and there followed a period of intense debate over whether or not to intervene and on which side. In favor of neutrality were Italy's dominant Liberal parliamentarian, Giovanni Giolitti, the Socialist Party (PSI, founded 1892), and the Catholic Church. Voices favoring intervention on the side of the empires (Germany and Austria-Hungary) were quickly drowned in a chorus calling for war on the side of the "democracies" England and France (and Russia). Liberals were divided over the issue, many rejecting Giolitti's position of neutrality. The Nationalists (founded as a political party in 1910) were strongly in favor of war, as was the erratic Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), who was expelled from the Socialist Party for his interventionism. Perhaps most prominent of all among the interventionists was the dashing literary figure Gabriele D'Annunzio, who (with the connivance of the French) returned to Italy in spite of financial difficulties that had forced his expatriation. In the so-called radiant days of May, D'Annunzio addressed huge crowds from his hotel in Rome, and the excitement he inspired helped to sway parliament in favor of war.

Italy declared war that same month and so opened up a southern front against its traditional enemy, Austria. Though the Central Powers saw this as a betrayal of the Triple Alliance, most historians agree that Italy was not bound to follow its allies into an aggressive war and that the choice to side with the Entente was legitimate. War on the southern front, though in mountainous terrain, resembled that in the west, namely trenches and stalemate. Stalemate until October 1917, anyway, when the Central Powers, thanks to the withdrawal of Russia from the war following the Bolshevik Revolution, were able to redirect some of their forces against Italy. The result was the devastating defeat at Caporetto, immortalized in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929). The Italians fell back more than one hundred kilometers and lost forty thousand lives (plus 275,000 prisoners) but ultimately held fast at the Piave River (hence the miracle of the Piave; the river reportedly ran red with blood). The Italian prime minister and chief of staff were both replaced, and still in the early twenty-first century Italians may describe a disastrous event or defeat as a Caporetto. The war of course dragged on for another year, until in October 1918 the Italian forces launched an attack against the already demoralized Austrian forces and scored a resounding victory in the battle of Vittorio Veneto, marking the end of the war and heralding the dissolution of the Austrian Empire. In three and a half years of war, Italy had suffered 650,000 deaths, nearly as many as the United Kingdom.

POSTWAR ITALY AND THE FASCIST SEIZURE OF POWER

Postwar Italy faced considerable economic and political challenges. Many soldiers from the middle-class were demobilized only to find that their sacrifices had left them worse off than before the war, largely because of inflation. Workers, however, both industrial and agricultural, found their position strengthened relative to capital and were able to push their advantage in what came to be known as the red biennium (1919–1920). Meanwhile the liberal democratic program generally had been badly compromised by its failure to prevent the devastation of World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 offered a specter that might be either attractive or menacing depending on where one stood on the social question.

Italy's traditional leaders had no ready answers, and their credibility was further strained because of the failure to achieve Italian war aims at the Paris Peace Conference. By most measures, the settlement treated Italy well. It got Trentino-Alto Adige, Trieste, and Istria from the dismembered Austrian Empire but failed to get any colonial concessions and was denied the city of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), centerpiece of the so-called mutilated victory. It was once again D'Annunzio who grabbed the spotlight by leading a group of irregulars into Fiume and seizing it for Italy. In the face of this foreign-policy disaster, the government dithered and D'Annunzio ruled over the rogue city-state for a year at the end of which Giolitti, returned to the stage, sent in the troops to oust D'Annunzio and company in the so-called Christmas of Blood (1920), though in fact little was spilled.

It was a period rife with agitation. Nor did the changes in parliamentary politics point in any obvious direction. In 1919, after decades of Vatican-imposed boycott, the progressive Catholic political forces organized into a political party, the Popolari, and immediately captured 20 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The Socialists had still more—nearly a third of the total—though in 1921 they would split into Communist and Socialist parties over the issue of adherence to the Third International organized by the Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; 1870–1924). The Liberals only barely held on to power.

It was in this context that the former revolutionary Socialist Mussolini founded his Fascist movement, also in 1919. Reconstructing Mussolini's intellectual development is perilous, but it would seem that he became disillusioned with the workers as a revolutionary force following the various failures of the general strike before the war. Influenced by both French syndicalism (an antimaterialist revision of Marxism) and Italian futurism (an avant-garde art movement fascinated with speed and violence), he perceived of violence as a positive source of change—war as the world's hygiene—and moved in 1914 from Socialist opposition to the bourgeois war to strident interventionism. The enthusiasm of the European masses for the war seems also to have convinced him that the most dynamic political force of the day was not the working class but the nation. Initiating his "slide to the right," Mussolini found himself ever closer to the Nationalists (who would eventually be absorbed into the Fascist movement). The Fascists of the first hour were instead an eclectic group of veterans, syndicalists, and futurists, and for a time the movement was so marginal that Mussolini himself almost abandoned it. What fascism had going for it, however, was its antisocialism. In particular the rural fasci (as the Fascist groups were called) in the Po Valley began a systematic campaign of violence against Socialist strikers, chambers of labor, and politicians (to a lesser extent they also targeted left-wing Christian Democratic organizers) that included beatings, forced drinking of castor oil, and the occasional murder. Not surprisingly these Fascist squads, largely made up of disgruntled petit bourgeois and veterans who saw in fascism a way to bring the war to the home front, quickly gained the sympathy of landowners and industrialists who provided support, while the police often turned a blind eye to their excesses. The movement-become-party grew rapidly and scored a significant triumph in capturing thirty-five seats in the 1921 election.

Mussolini saw his opportunity and organized the March on Rome in October 1922. Fascists seized local administration and infrastructure in the cities of the center-north and converged on the capital. As it turned out, no violent revolution or coup d'état occurred. Instead the king and Liberal political leaders agreed to Mussolini's demands and appointed him prime minister. He would remain in power for the next twenty-one years. Responsibility for the Fascist seizure of power has been variously assigned to the extreme Left that preached revolution, probably without conviction but sufficiently to terrorize sectors of public opinion; to the king, who decided against mobilizing the army against the Fascists (perhaps out of fear of a rebellion within the ranks); to Giolitti and the Liberals, who were willing to overlook Fascist illegalities and imagined they could manage Mussolini; to the church, which vetoed cooperation between the Popolari and the Socialists; and to the Popolari themselves, who refused to cooperate with Giolitti and so perhaps stabilize the political situation.

THE FASCIST PERIOD

Within a couple of years, Mussolini had established his dictatorship. Opposition parties were banned; the press was censored; and opponents of the regime were either jailed or went into exile (Paris became the center of the antifascist opposition). Il duce (the leader) sought to create a new Italy and a new Fascist man (and, to a lesser extent, woman). His was to be a third way between democracy and socialism. At its center was Fascist corporativism, according to which society (and government) were to be organized according to categories of production, and the state would mediate any conflicts between capital and labor. Little though was realized in this regard. Strikes were of course outlawed and wages controlled (in practice lowered on a couple of occasions). For the most part the regime sided with capital. Private property was never threatened, though Mussolini did at times assert his independence in the economic sphere, for example famously fixing the value of the lira at an exaggerated ninety to the pound sterling in 1927. Plans for the reorganization of Italy's parliamentary system along corporativist lines foundered, and while the Chamber and Senate continued to exist, their function was reduced to little more than approving Mussolini's policies. For a time the Fascist Grand Council served as something of a governing body but in later years it rarely met.

Mussolini had come to power thanks to the Fascist squads, and at times they and their leaders threatened to escape his control and even challenge his leadership. In order to bring them into line they were organized into a formal militia, the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN), which would later participate in various of Italy's military adventures. Creation of the MVSN presaged the militarization of Italian society generally under fascism. Boys (the Balilla) and girls (the Daughters of the Wolf) from a tender age were organized into Fascist groups, where they donned uniforms, marched, sang Fascist hymns, and learned rifle practice (boys) or coordinated gymnastics (girls). These organizations continued right up through university students and were preparation for entering the Fascist Party as adults. Notably they coopted other youth groups such as the Catholic scouts.

Militarization was just one aspect of Fascist social control. Though only partially successful, fascism sought to penetrate all aspects of Italian life: school, the workplace, cultural production, academia, and even the home. In addition to participating in youth groups, then, school-age Italians read Fascist textbooks and, like Italians of all ages, participated in Fascist demonstrations that inevitably celebrated the regime and its duce. Workers were enrolled in Fascist unions (the Socialist, Catholic, and other ones having been eliminated) and were encouraged to participate in the dopolavoro (workingmen's recreation clubs) that organized leisure time activities outside of work. Moreover, many occupations, especially public ones, came to require membership in the Fascist Party. Women meanwhile were organized into women's fasci (largely urban) and the massaie rurali ("rural housewives"; for peasant women).

Fascist cultural policy was relatively pluralist, encouraging both nostalgic and avant-garde literary and artistic movements (providing they were not antifascist). Important twentieth-century authors such as Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) and Elio Vittorini (1908–1966) and painters such as Giorgio Di Chirico (1888–1978) were active in the Fascist period, while even work that was frequently viewed as "fascist" in the immediate postwar period, such as the painting of Mario Sironi (1885–1961) and more generally Italian rationalist architectural production of the 1930s, has since been rehabilitated and its intrinsic worth recognized. University professors meanwhile were required to swear an oath of allegiance to fascism in 1931. The fact that only twelve refused can be taken as a sign either of widespread consensus or else general acquiescence in a climate of repression.

Convinced of the power of numbers, Mussolini also pursued a policy aimed at population increase. Indicative of fascism's failure to penetrate to the more intimate facets of Italian life, the policy sought to encourage marriage and large families, to little effect. Other aspects included severe restrictions on emigration and the encouragement of settlement on reclaimed lands and in new agricultural communities in the Italian colonies of Libya and later Ethiopia.

Probably the principal challenge to the fascistization of Italian society came from the church. Skeptical of democracy and avowedly opposed to socialism, the church had in some ways welcomed and facilitated the advent of Fascist rule. The regime, however, learned too well from Catholic practices and sought to emulate and co-opt the social program of the church on multiple levels. Initially it was Fascist-Catholic accord that dominated, culminating in the Lateran Treaty of 1929. That agreement ended nearly seventy years of conflict between the Italian state and the church. Roman Catholicism was recognized as Italy's official religion, religious teaching in the schools was guaranteed, and church jurisdiction over the Vatican City was recognized. It was one of Mussolini's greatest foreign policy triumphs. The relationship continued to be a tense one, however; in proposing itself as a quasi-religion, fascism inevitably came into conflict with the older institution. Nonetheless, important strains of Italian Catholicism remained committed to fascism till the end.

In spite of its repressive nature, the Fascist regime had many admirers in the liberal democratic West. For while the Left was almost unanimously antifascist, important centrists and conservatives rationalized that while Fascist violence and the limitation of fundamental freedoms were unfortunate, Mussolini had managed to bring order to an unruly and potentially revolutionary place. Judging domestic attitudes about the regime is harder (and much debated). Whether one argues that a majority of Italians supported the regime at some point or else simply silenced their dissent in a climate of dictatorship, it is likely that the regime enjoyed its most widespread acceptance in the period between the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and the Ethiopian conquest of 1936.

Both of those events played decisive roles in the international and domestic fortunes of Fascist Italy. Following on that earlier triumph and then on the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, Mussolini indeed appeared to some a force of moderation and order on the European scene. Most notably, following the assassination of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934) by Nazis in 1934 (his family was visiting with Mussolini's at the time), Italy sent troops to the Brenner Pass and so prevented the expected Anschluss, or annexation of Austria by Germany. Italy's role as a peacemaker was, however, to be short-lived, largely because of Fascist expansionist designs.

In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia in a move to round out its East African holdings and inevitably recalling the humiliating Italian defeat suffered there in 1896. Ethiopian resistance was fierce but ultimately no match for the massive effort of the Italians; infamously the Italian air force employed poison gas, contrary to international agreements. To cheering crowds in Piazza Venezia, Mussolini announced in May 1936 that empire had returned to the fatal hills of Rome. By some measures this moment marked his greatest triumph. By others it was the beginning of the end and of the spiral that led to World War II and disaster. By insisting on Italy's right to empire, Mussolini alienated most of the other great powers and earned both condemnation and sanctions from the League of Nations. The exceptions were the United States, which had never joined the League, and Nazi Germany, which had withdrawn in 1933. Mussolini's African adventure had the effect then of at once using up Italian military resources and pushing Italy into the Nazi camp. Later in 1936, il duce sent troops to fight alongside the nationalist rebels of Francisco Franco (1892–1975) in Spain (Franco also received support from Germany). The Spanish loyalists instead received some support from the Soviet Union and also from the volunteers of the international brigades. Notably, Italian antifascists fought alongside the loyalists, with the result that Italy was probably the only country with significant forces on both sides. Contemporary with the Spanish civil war Mussolini also declared formation of a Rome-Berlin Axis. When Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) again moved to absorb Austria into the Reich in 1938, Mussolini was neither capable nor inclined to resist the move. In 1939 the alliance between Italy and Germany was formalized in the so-called Pact of Steel.

NAZI ALLIANCE AND WORLD WAR II

By the time of the Pact of Steel, Fascist Italy had entered into its darkest and final chapter. Fascism, unlike Nazism, had not been based in a fundamental way on a racist vision, though its integral nationalism certainly held within it the seeds of racism. Those seeds bore fruit in the several African colonies where indigenous resistance to Italian rule was brutally repressed and the creation of the empire in 1936 was accompanied by the introduction of colonial apartheid legislation. Domestically there had not been much of a Jewish question in Italy prior to Hitler's seizure of power (except insofar as Italy was home to traditional Catholic anti-Semitism). Nonetheless, in 1938 Mussolini's scientists declared the existence of an Aryan Italian race to which Jews (as well as blacks and Arabs) did not belong. The laws passed in November of that year deprived Jews of various rights and in some cases their livelihood (though not, as in Germany, of their citizenship).

The laws were subsequently tightened and of course encouraged the emigration of a significant percentage of Italy's small Jewish population. Italy was certainly the poorer. To cite just one example, Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), who had discovered nuclear fission and had a Jewish wife, left for the United States, where he helped develop one of the atom bombs dropped on Japan. It is not clear precisely why Mussolini introduced the racial laws. There is, for example, no evidence that Hitler pressured him to do so. Yet the Italian dictator had become increasingly frustrated at the regime's failure to create the hoped-for heroic and new Fascist society. It may be that Mussolini's various and aggressive policies of the period—Ethiopia, Spain, the racial laws, alliance with Germany, and intervention in World War II—were a series of attempts to jostle Italians into taking up their appointed and historic role in world affairs.

The Pact of Steel stipulated that the two allies would come to the aid of one another should either become "engaged in war"—an offensive alliance—but also that they keep one another informed on "all questions of common interest and relative to the European situation" (author's translation). Hitler failed to inform Mussolini of his surprise attack of Poland in September 1939, and so Italy found itself in a situation analogous to that of 1914. Mussolini bought time by declaring a status of nonbelligerence (a Fascist could not really be neutral). In fact there were elements close to il duce sufficiently alarmed at the prospect of going to war alongside Germany that they urged continued neutrality. However, much as Mussolini had been determined to wipe out the humiliation of defeat in Ethiopia, so was he committed to erasing the "betrayal" of the Triple Alliance in 1915. As Germany was marching through France in June 1940, Italy declared war on the side of its Nazi ally.

The Italian entry into the war was little short of disastrous. Determined to act autonomously (as Hitler had), Mussolini opened up a new front by attacking Greece, but the combination of inadequate preparation, stiff resistance from the smaller opponent, and the Balkan winter bogged down the Italian forces. The stalemate continued until German forces launched an offensive that led to the conquest of both Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. Certainly Italy bears as a result some responsibility for the suffering of the Yugoslav and Greek people during the occupation (including the deportation of Greek Jews to the death camps, perhaps the farthest-flung of the Holocaust's victims). At the same time, the Balkan distraction may have negatively affected the subsequent German campaign against the Soviet Union.

Italy's military debacles did not end with Greece. One month prior to the Greek invasion, the Italian military in Libya had attacked the British in Egypt only to suffer a withering counterattack and forced retreat. In this case too German troops (under Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel; 1891–1944), came to the aid of the Italians. There ensued the back-and-forth battles of the North African campaign that culminated in the Allied occupation of Libya and defeat of the Axis forces in Africa by early 1943. Meanwhile similar hostilities between Britain (regularly referred to in the Italian press as "perfidious Albion" in the period) and Italy in the Horn of Africa led to the loss of Ethiopia (along with Somalia and Eritrea) in 1941, only five years after its capture.

Given Italy's limited industrial capacity and the military overextension related to Ethiopia and Spain, military experts were correct in deeming the country unprepared for a European war. Mussolini had gone ahead anyway. The combination of the setbacks described above (hard to disguise even in the heavily censored Italian media), material hardships suffered by the Italian people, and the bombing of Italian ports and cities by the Royal Navy meant that what little enthusiasm there had been for the war in Italy quickly waned. In July 1943, not long after Mussolini had declared that foreign troops would never set foot in Italy, the Allies crossed over to Sicily from North Africa and took the island. In light of this crisis, Mussolini convened the long-inactive Fascist Grand Council. In a tense meeting that lasted until the early hours of 25 July—several members were armed—the Grand Council voted to return authority to the king. Mussolini, increasingly unrealistic at this time, fully imagined that he would be reappointed as head of state. Instead he was arrested and eventually held in a mountaintop retreat east of Rome.

Marshall Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956), who had fought in Libya, World War I, and Ethiopia, was appointed prime minister. Badoglio and the king at this point made a serious blunder. While initiating secret negotiations for a separate peace with the Allies, Badoglio announced that Italy would remain faithful to the Axis. Hitler had lost all confidence in the Italians and in order to counter an eventual betrayal he flooded Italy with German troops. By September, when Badoglio finally announced the armistice, the Nazis were able fairly easily to secure most of the peninsula and, in an embarrassing move, Badoglio and the king fled the capital, leaving most of the Italian population to its fate, and set up a new government in Brindisi, by then in the hands of the Allies. Had Badoglio moved immediately to end the alliance with Germany, he would have stranded the Italian troops fighting on the eastern front and the Italian workers in Germany—eventually they were stranded anyway—but might have saved a great deal of suffering in Italy.

September 1943 marked the beginning of the most difficult period of the war in Italy, effectively one of civil war. The Badoglio government operated in the South, where the Allies had secured a stronghold, and in October declared war on Germany. Most of the peninsula was instead in German hands. Contemporary with the armistice, Mussolini had been liberated from his prison by Nazi paratroopers and whisked off to Munich, from where he exhorted Italians to stand by their German allies. He subsequently returned to Italy at the head of a new Italian Social Republic (RSI), also known as the Republic of Salò (after the site of Mussolini's headquarters). Italy then had two governments at war against one another, though Mussolini's administration was little more than a puppet of the Nazi occupation and Badoglio was largely subservient to the Allies. Contemporary with the arrival of the Nazi occupiers, groups of Italians began engaging in acts of armed resistance. In Naples, that resistance was seconded by the arrival of the Allies and the liberation of the city on 1 October 1943. In Rome, by contrast, armed resistance was suppressed and liberation delayed until June 1944, just two days before D-Day.

Between late 1943 and the end of the war in April 1945, the Allies slowly fought their way up the peninsula at considerable human cost. The Italian resistance meanwhile organized into the Committees of National Liberation (Comitati di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN). The largest and best-organized of these committees was the Communists, who indeed had carried on their antifascist opposition since 1925. Also included were Christian Democrats, Socialists, and other smaller groups. The CLNs in fact laid the basis for Italy's postwar political landscape. In the south the CLNs were presided over by Ivanoe Bonomi, who in 1944 replaced Badoglio as head of the Italian government. In the center and north, the CLNs of course had to organize secretly. They and other linked organizations of partisans carried out armed actions against Nazi and Fascist forces. In one dramatic instance, a resistance group carried out an attack in the center of Rome in March 1944, killing thirty-three German soldiers. As on other similar occasions, the Germans responded by massacring ten Italians for every German killed. In all, 335 victims were shot and buried at the Ardeatine Caves, for the most part imprisoned antifascists and including a significant number of Jews.

The occupation had in fact sealed the fate of many of Italy's Jews. With the cooperation of Italian Fascist authorities, Nazis began systematic roundups of Jews in Italy and their deportation to the death camps. Best known of these was probably the chemist and writer Primo Levi (1919–1987), captured as part of a partisan band and sent to Auschwitz. He famously recounted those experiences in his Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959, also published as Survival in Auschwitz). In all some eight thousand Italian Jews were killed (about 17 percent of the prewar Italian Jewish population). The racial laws had always been unpopular in Italy, and while many unrepentant Fascists (and opportunists) supported the RSI-Nazi alliance (including the organization of Black Brigades and an Italian SS), other Italians took great risks to hide both Jews and resistance fighters from the authorities. Monasteries, convents, and churches also played an important role in saving lives; the Vatican, however, did little.

The role of the Resistance in the conflict is debated. Allied officials generally maintained that while the partisans were not a deciding factor in the war, they did facilitate the taking of a number of cities. For postwar Italy, however, the significance of the Resistance was enormous. Not only was it the proving ground for most subsequent Italian political, social, and cultural leaders, it also allowed Italy to save face following the war (in a way that Germany never could) insofar as some Italians had taken up arms against Nazi-fascism and so implicitly the evils it had perpetrated. Significantly there was no Italian Nuremberg or postwar purge of the public bureaucracy. Since the end of the Cold War the antifascist legacy has been challenged, as revisionist interpretations have questioned the antifascist monopoly on virtue while arguing that both sides were guilty of excesses, that fascism had some real accomplishments, and that the alliance with Hitler was unfortunate and largely to blame for Fascist crimes.

That alliance of course finally ended with the victory of the Allies in April–May 1945. As American and British troops liberated the cities of northern Italy, Mussolini, disguised as a German soldier, sought to flee to Switzerland together with his mistress. Apprehended by a band of partisans, his party was summarily tried and shot. In a grisly finale, their bodies were driven back to Milan, kicked and spat on by the mob, and strung up by the heels in a gas station.

CREATION OF
THE REPUBLIC AND THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE

Unlike Germany, Italy's status as a cobelligerent meant that it regained sovereignty fairly quickly (though it lost Fiume and Istria to Yugoslavia and some territory to France as well). The first postwar elections (also the first since 1924 and the first ever in which women voted) were held in June 1946. That vote accomplished two things. It eliminated the monarchy, badly compromised by its association with fascism, and elected a Constituent Assembly in which most of the antifascist parties were represented. The two most significant of these were the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, or DC) led by Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954), who following a brief imprisonment had spent most of the interwar period working in the Vatican Library; and the Communists (PCI) led by Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), who had spent more or less that same period in Moscow. Initially the parties cooperated on drafting a new constitution. Notably, the Communist Togliatti had essentially renounced the path of revolutionary change and class warfare in favor of cooperation with the other political forces; he also accepted the Lateran Treaty and so recognition of Roman Catholicism as the official religion of Italy. Cooperation, however, was short-lived and at the urging of both the Vatican and the United States, Prime Minister De Gasperi dropped the Left from his government before the first parliamentary elections of April 1948. In a passionately fought campaign, masses of Italians turned out for Communist and Socialist demonstrations. Meanwhile the church cast the vote as a choice between God and Stalin (Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin [1879–1953]), while U.S. officials openly supported the Christian Democrats and threatened to end financial aid under the Marshall Plan should the Left win. The DC in fact won a near majority, and so the stage was set for Italian politics of the next half century, namely Christian Democratic administrations (normally in coalition with other parties) and Communist opposition.

Italy had experienced limited economic growth during fascism. The regime had weathered the Depression fairly well and established the bases for public social services and state-owned industry and banks, but the war had left the country with a severe housing shortage, devastated infrastructure, and much reduced industrial capacity. Thanks in part to United States aid, however, recovery was remarkably rapid, and the traditional stereotype of a land of peasants, agriculture, and poverty gave way first to cinematic visions of la dolce vita (the sweet life)—in the cities of the center-north—against a background of relative misery, and then to a wealthy and largely American-inspired consumerist culture. The central years of what came to be known as the economic miracle were 1958–1963, during which period the Italian economy grew at incredible rates, more than 6 percent per year. Only Japan and Germany could match those rates at the time.

It was also a golden age for Italian cinema, and the flavor of the age is perhaps best captured in its movies. The neorealist movement of the 1940s and 1950s depicted most notably the war experience and resistance—for example, in Roberto Rossellini's (1906–1977) Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946)—and the crushing poverty under which most Italians still suffered, movingly depicted in Vittorio De Sica's (1901–1974) The Bicycle Thief (1948) and other films. Later the Christian Democratic politician (and seven-time prime minister) Giulio Andreotti (b. 1919) would famously criticize De Sica and other directors for washing Italy's dirty linen in public and casting the nation in such a negative light. Federico Fellini's (1920–1993) classics, La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963), depict instead an exuberant Italy at once dedicated to the sorts of hedonistic pleasures made possible by the miracle and at the same time plunged into an existential crisis by those very opportunities.

And it was a time of great opportunity, change, and upheaval, all three perhaps best epitomized by the success of the Fiat automobile company in Turin. Fiat functioned as a major employer of labor and also manufactured a product, especially the small 500s and 600s, that represented an attainable though previously inconceivable luxury for working Italians. Moreover, the continued concentration of industries such as Fiat in the north combined with southern unemployment created intense internal migration in the period. The cities of the north exploded, resulting in overcrowding, the springing up of shanty towns, and severe taxing of infrastructure. And while southern workers were needed to fuel northern economic growth, there was considerable resentment on the part of local populations regarding the dark haired and poorly dressed immigrants who spoke strange and unintelligible dialects. This reality is again best captured in one of the film classics of the period, Luchino Visconti's (1906–1976) Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Emigration abroad also took off again following World War II. During 1946–1975, total Italian emigration exceeded seven million, about five million going to other European countries (Switzerland, Germany, France) and the rest overseas (Argentina, the United States, Canada, Venezuela). Well over half those emigrants came from the south (which accounted for only about a third of Italy's total population).

THE FIRST REPUBLIC AND ITS CHALLENGES

As mentioned above, the fundamental political division in Italy from 1948 to 1994 was between the Christian Democrats and the Communists. Indeed this was more than a political contest, as political affiliation came to inform the social and cultural lives of many Italians. In the workplace both parties had their own unions (which cooperated to a certain extent); outside the workplace both had their own after-work organizations. Both founded women's organizations. These were of course not the only political parties but they did come to dominate much of Italian life. Italian cultural life—for example, publishing and literature, films, the university—was dominated by the PCI, while the business world tended to be strongly DC. As for parliamentary politics, never able to repeat the electoral success of 1948, the DC was constantly on the lookout for governing partners. Overtures to the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, or MSI) clashed with public opinion, so DC leaders looked to the left, in particular to the Socialists. Never terribly successful in advancing their own political agenda, the PSI did join a first center-left coalition in 1963 and would continue with some interruptions as a governing party for the next three decades. What can be said about the DC in the period through to the mid-1960s is that they did not prevent the miracle. The Communists might have, as evidence from Eastern Europe in the period suggests. The DC maintained Italy's adherence to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States alliance as well as establishing Italy's charter memberships in the Coal and Steel Community (1951) and European Economic Community (by the 1957 Treaty of Rome). Yet the DC, at times complicit with the Mafia, permitted an unplanned and unregulated growth that scarred the Italian land and especially cityscapes forever.

The PCI meanwhile continued to garner the largest share of votes on the left and in the mid-1970s looked poised to surpass the DC. PCI secretary Enrico Berlinguer (1922–1984) had distanced the party from Moscow and proposed a democratic Eurocommunism. Notably, he reversed a previous PCI position and stated that the PCI in power would not pull Italy out of NATO. These positions attracted some DC politicians, most notably Aldo Moro (1916–1978), and raised the possibility of the so-called historic compromise, namely a DC-PCI coalition government. Others instead were alarmed by this possibility, in particular the Americans, who in the person of the U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) warned against the communist threat.

The 1970s were a tumultuous period. As in France, the United States, and elsewhere, a series of dramatic but largely peaceful student and worker protests broke out in 1968–1969. Charting a new Marxist-inspired political program, the students called for revolutionary change and collective action while challenging in a fundamental way the materialist individualism spawned by the miracle; the movement also took up related issues such as workers' and prisoners' rights and protested against the war in Vietnam and American imperialism generally. In terms of realizing their own goals, this revolutionary moment was a failure. But its impact was considerable, nonetheless, as a whole generation was indelibly marked by the experiences of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the movement may have forced Italy to become more self-critical and to question the American consumerist model it had adopted. That period also saw the birth of the Italian feminist movement and so an important challenge and revision of Italy's traditionally patriarchal society. And while little of the social legislation that had been demanded in the period was enacted, a couple of important laws, significantly championed by the feminist movement, undoubtedly owed something to the atmosphere of those times. One such law legalized divorce in 1970. Opposed by the church and the DC, this law was eventually upheld by popular referendum in 1974. Subsequently, there developed a grassroots movement to legalize abortion, which, also in spite of DC opposition, was successful in 1978.

It was also a decade of urban terror, the so-called years of lead. Probably in response to the perceived threat posed by this new Left, right-wing neofascist elements embarked on what came to be known as the strategy of tension, namely acts of terror intended at once to discredit the Left and encourage the introduction of more authoritarian policies. The first event in that sad history occurred when a bomb exploded in a Milanese bank in Piazza Fontana in December 1969, killing sixteen people. Following on the so-called hot autumn of worker and student protests, conservative and right-wing elements initially ascribed the bombing to anarchists. Several anarchists were in fact arrested, and one died suspiciously after falling from a police station window, an event made famous by Nobel Prize–winning Dario Fo's play, Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1970; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 1979). These events were always cloaked in mystery, but the Piazza Fontana bombing did turn out to be organized by radical neofascists. There followed a series of similar indiscriminate bombings culminating in the Bologna train station attack in summer 1980 that killed eighty-five people.

Contemporary with these bombings, frustrated elements of the new revolutionary Left also turned to violence, most notably those organized as the Red Brigades, whose first action dates from 1970. Left-wing terror tended to be more specific in its targets and included the knee-capping and assassination of policemen and political figures as well as a series of much-publicized kidnappings. The most famous was the dramatic kidnapping of the DC president Aldo Moro in Rome in 1978. Moro was held for almost two months during which the brigatisti demanded the release of their comrades from prison. Under Prime Minister Andreotti, the government refused to negotiate with the terrorists. In May, the kidnappers, who had already tried Moro and sentenced him to death, loaded him into the trunk of a Renault 4, shot him in the head, and abandoned the car in the center of Rome, tipping off authorities as to its whereabouts.

The motivations and forces behind the violence of the 1970s remain mysterious, and there exist both evidence for and much speculation about the involvement of political and secret service elements (perhaps with foreign, especially U.S., ties) seeking to achieve particular aims. The murder of Moro, for example, effectively torpedoed the historic compromise between DC and PCI. Yet while the perpetrators of neofascist violence were only sporadically identified, the Red Brigades were effectively dismantled by the police work of General Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa (1920–1982). And those convicted of the Moro kidnapping all denied that they had been in any way infiltrated by outside forces.

Della Chiesa's next assignment was to try his methods against a more deeply rooted challenge to law and order in Italy, namely the Sicilian Mafia. Complaining that he did not have adequate support from the state for the undertaking, Della Chiesa was in fact murdered within months of arriving in Palermo in 1982. In its more than century-long existence the Mafia had normally avoided this sort of high-profile killing; it signaled in fact a new phase in the relationship between the state and organized crime. Historically, claims about the phenomenon had ranged from the simple denial of its existence to assertion of an articulated organization with links to politics and business. Mussolini's regime had undertaken a campaign to crush the Mafia, and while many arrests were made, they were primarily of petty criminals, and the Mafia bosses continued to operate undisturbed, generally supportive of fascism. Needless to say, organized crime took its share of postwar prosperity, and the continued failure of development in the south certainly owes something to its operation. Nonetheless, postwar governments and the Mafia generally maintained an uneasy coexistence until the 1980s.

Following the Della Chiesa murder, a new anti-Mafia "pool" of magistrates was created in Palermo, the best-known members of which were Giovanni Falcone (1939–1992) and Paolo Borsellino (1940–1992). Thanks largely to testimony from Tommaso Buscetta (1928–2000), an important Mafioso captured in Brazil and turned state's evidence, the pool pursued investigations leading to the maxi-trial of 1986–1987. Held in a specially constructed bunker/courtroom, the maxi-trial resulted in convictions against 344 of 475 accused Mafiosi, easily the biggest blow the state had ever delivered against the organization. Subsequent disbanding of the pool of magistrates and reversal of some of these convictions lent credibility to the accusations of connections between the Mafia and government politicians. Falcone, however, with support in Rome, managed to uphold many of the convictions in early 1992, in part by blocking a chosen appointment of Salvatore "Salvo" Lima (1928–1992), a Sicilian Christian Democratic politician with close ties to Andreotti. Then in quick succession, Lima, Falcone, and Borsellino were all killed in Palermo.

As later came to light, the murders were ordered by Salvatore "Totò" Riina, a fugitive since 1969 (during which time he seems to have lived undisturbed in Palermo with his wife and children) and head of the Corleone Mafia family. Lima, the hinge between politics and crime in Sicily, had apparently outlived his usefulness (though his supporters continue to maintain his anti-Mafia credentials), while Falcone and Borsellino were a continuing threat for Riina. It was a dark moment, but the work of the pool had changed public attitudes in Sicily about the Mafia in a fundamental way. Countering the despair inspired by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino was the arrest of Riina himself in January 1993; he was subsequently sentenced to multiple life sentences. On the political side, Andreotti (who was appointed senator for life in 1991 after forty-five years in the Chamber of Deputies) was formally accused of Mafia collusion; although initially convicted of ordering the murder of a journalist (in 1979), that conviction was overturned and the others failed to stick. As of 2006, he was still politically active.

TANGENTOPOLI AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC

The year 1992 also saw the beginning of the tangentopoli (bribe city) scandal that, like the Mafia investigation, marked the end of postwar Italian business as usual. In this case the pool of magistrates was centered in Milan, Italy's financial capital; its most notable exponent was the charismatic Antonio Di Pietro, a southerner who (like Falcone) rose from humble origins to near superstar status. Politically, Italy was governed throughout the 1980s by the pentapartito, a DC-led five-party coalition in which the significant junior partner was the Socialists, led from 1976 by the forceful figure of Bettino Craxi (1934–2000). Craxi gave new life to the PSI. He was Milanese and shaped the party in the image of that most dynamic of Italian cities. The PSI, in fact, from near extinction became under Craxi the party of Italy's new wealth, of which there was plenty in the boom years of that decade. A rare non-DC prime minister, Craxi held the post for an unprecedented three-and-a-half years (1983–1987). Among his accomplishments was the 1984 revision of the Lateran Treaty, which eliminated the privileged legal status of Catholicism in Italy and recognized the equality of all faiths. He also oversaw unprecedented levels of corruption as revealed by the Milan pool of magistrate's Clean Hands investigation. Starting with a retirement home in Milan, a vast world of kickbacks was revealed in which party representatives regularly received payments for the awarding of public contracts and other official favors. In the so-called maxibribe, one company apparently paid upward of $15 million (some claim much more) to ensure its purchase by the state. Revelations in that regard led to two (apparent) suicides. In all, by 1997 the pool had issued 2,575 accusations and won 577 convictions while uncovering about $3 billion in bribes.

The majority of those accusations targeted Christian Democrats and Socialists. Craxi, who would be convicted on several counts, claimed that all parties took bribes, as the Italian system provided no other way to finance political life. His apparent honesty earned him little sympathy. Given that the PCI was left virtually unscathed, he and others accused the Milan pool of carrying out a leftist political agenda, though subsequent scrutiny failed to reveal much Communist wrong-doing. The political fallout was enormous, so great that some have spoken of a Second Republic following the scandals. It was as if the end of the Cold War had unleashed Italy's demons, and the pro-U.S. DC was no longer unassailable. In fact, after performing poorly in the 1992 elections, the pentapartito essentially collapsed (Andreotti headed the last DC government). Both the DC and the PSI ceased to exist, while Craxi, for example, in 1994 fled to his villa in Tunisia (from which he would never return, dying in 2000). As elections in 1994 approached it seemed that the former Communists, renamed the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, or PDS; later Democratici di Sinistra, or DS), were poised finally to take up the reins of power.

That, however, did not happen. At the eleventh hour a new political force emerged in the person of Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936). The Milanese Berlusconi had erected a massive real estate and media empire in the boom years of the 1980s, often with Socialist patronage. Reportedly he is the wealthiest man in Italy. He also owns the A.C. Milan soccer team and structured his political organization, Forza Italia (Go Italy, a soccer cheer), like a series of sports clubs. Remarkably, in the few months leading up to the March 1994 elections, Berlusconi managed to counter the Communist threat by bringing together unlikely bedfellows, the National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale, or AN) and Northern League (Lega Nord, or Lega). The AN was the renamed neofascist, now postfascist, party led by the able Gianfranco Fini (b. 1952). A champion of the social state, its stronghold was in the center and south, especially among public employees. The Lega, instead, led by the gruff Umberto Bossi (b. 1941), was a northern secessionist party that protested against government corruption and the presumed siphoning off of northern wealth to fund the poor south. In spite of obvious differences, Berlusconi managed to join these three groups together and defeated the Left in the 1994 election. Appointed prime minister, Berlusconi's tenure was a brief one. Before the year was up, Bossi pulled out in protest and caused the government to fall. Following a couple of "technical" governments, elections were held again in 1996. By that time a clear center-left coalition, the Ulivo or Olive Tree, had emerged led by a respected economist with former DC connections, Romano Prodi (though the major partner remained the DS). The center-right coalition (Casa della Libertà, or House of Liberty) had repaired its differences. The Ulivo won, and Prodi was appointed prime minister. Fiscally responsible, Prodi's greatest triumph was putting Italy's financial house in order sufficiently so that it succeeded in joining the European and Monetary Union as a charter member in 1999 (the euro itself coming into circulation in 2002). Internal (and self-defeating) squabbles within the Ulivo led to Prodi's replacement in 1998 by Massimo D'Alema, Italy's first former-Communist prime minister.

Unable to capitalize on its achievements, however, the center-left was resoundingly defeated by Berlusconi's coalition in 2001. Such was his victory that Berlusconi was able to maintain the premiership for the entire five-year legislature. On the one hand, the 2001 victory signaled the introduction into Italy of healthy democratic alternation of power (as compared to the DC lock on power for over four decades). On the other hand, Berlusconi's near monopoly of Italian television has raised concern about his ability to manipulate public opinion, and various commentators claim that Berlusconi entered politics largely to protect his own financial interests. Officially accused numerous times of corruption, he has managed repeatedly to avoid conviction. Those accusations have even led foreign observers (most notably the Economist magazine) to deem him unfit to rule. In foreign policy, his pro-U.S. stance—he once half-mockingly said "I am on whatever side America is on, even before I know what it is"—led him to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and send troops to support the reconstruction effort in June of that year. Italian public opinion was however strongly opposed to the war, and in the run-up to the 2006 elections Berlusconi claimed—some thought cynically—that he had tried all along to convince U.S. President George W. Bush (b. 1946) not to go to war. Berlusconi was narrowly defeated in the April 2006 elections, losing to center-left candidate and former prime minister Romano Prodi.

Italy entered the twenty-first century a much different place than it had been one hundred years before. Economically it had moved from a minor European power to one of global importance, though politically it did not exert corresponding influence; in the context of European integration it probably never will. From an agricultural land of high fertility and emigration, it had become a service-dominated country with one of the lowest birthrates in the world (total fertility at or below 1.3 since the early 1990s) and the destination of large numbers of Third World immigrants (with all the problems of social dislocation and racism that the phenomenon brings). Italy had become a leader in design, fashion, and more prosaic small industries, and "made in Italy" had become a mark of quality and good taste. Its popularity as a tourist destination possibly unmatched (thanks to the art and architecture of earlier epochs and the cuisine and conviviality of the present one), Italy was still perceived as an enigmatic place maintaining signs of its past: pockets of traditional agriculture in the south, a tendency to autocracy in politics, corruption, and an easygoing approach to moral questions. In that, Italy fulfills each visitor's own expectations about the bel paese (beautiful country) and what it can offer.

See alsoAxis; Berlusconi, Silvio; Craxi, Bettino; D'Annunzio, Gabriele; Economic Miracle; Fascism; Fellini, Federico; Lateran Pacts; Levi, Primo; Mafia; Mussolini, Benito; Red Brigades; World War II.

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Carl Ipsen