The Difficult Piedmontization of Italy

Abstract

In 1824 Giacomo Leopardi wrote that “as the nation has no center, there is not really an Italian public.”¹ The situation had not greatly changed thirty-seven years later. When Italy unified, it suffered from two main defects, as Sabino Cassese put it: that of being “a state without a nation” and that of suffering from a “chronic weakness of its ruling class.”² As we go forward, let us keep in mind this correlation between the absence of a “center,” the weakness of a national “ruling class,” and the absence of an “Italian public.”