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Italia: Vita e avventure di un'idea

A historian of institutions, but with a keen eye to the social dimension, Meriggi illustrates an early-nineteenth-century trend, largely the result of European impulses, which influenced the whole peninsula. The transformations first of the republican period, then of the Napoleonic period, and finally of the Restoration, tended towards institutional and administrative uniformity across the Italian states, and even gave the ruling classes of the old states a first glimpse of a concrete national horizon. However, the internal differences within the peninsula remained profound: not just political, dynastic and local differences, but also the divide that long before 1861 separated northern and central Italy from the south. From this point of view, the similarities or uniformity of Italian public institutions in the decades studied by Meriggi threaten to hide the structural and cultural differences between these two halves of the peninsula. Municipalism, upon which Meriggi places so much emphasis, had different characteristics and efficiencies in the centre-north than in the south and these differences were to deepen over time: fertile, community-based and open to processes of democracy in one; sterile, tom apart by conflicts between landowners and peasants, suffocated by second-rate oligarchies of notables in the other.