THE ARCHIPELAGO

ITALY SINCE 1945

JOHN FOOT Bloomsbury, 480pp, £25, Oldie price £18.30 inc p&p

John Foot, the professor of Modern Italian History at Bristol University, argues persuasively that the decisions made in the five years after Mussolini’s dismissal in 1943 are the root cause of Italy’s current national division and political gridlock.

Ian Thomson in the Guardian said the referendum on the monarchy of 1946 ensured ‘the impoverished south remained monarchist; the prosperous north, republican’. The post-war republican government’s obsession that Italy would never again be run by a totalitarian government effectively caused the 1948 constitution to lock out any practical

opportunity for political reform.

Worse still, wrote Tom Kington in the Times, ‘the failure to follow Germany’s lead and uproot fascist culture ensured Italy’s political polarisation, as the wartime fascist v partisan rivalry echoed down the generations’.

Despite all this, Italy enjoyed a post-war economic and cultural boom in the 1950s, rivalled only by Japan. Its second industrial revolution saw agricultural workers, whose share of the population fell from 42 per cent in 1951 to 7 per cent in 1996, build suburbs in Milan or Turin, instead of emigrating to America.

‘With great skill,’ wrote Donald Sassoon in Literary Review, ‘Foot narrates the rise of consumerism, the impact of television and of television personalities. He ends his account as Five Star shapes up to give Italy its first populist government, noting that, the boom years aside, “it has been the sense of crisis and even decline that has held sway” since 1945. Ever the political laboratory, Italy is now looking to a party founded by a comedian to make it laugh again.’