Beware of Italy! Italian 2018 Elections in Historical Perspective

According to the author, the first goal of any historian trying to understand the evolution of Italian politics should be to get rid of the stereotypes about its colorful peculiarities and focus instead on some of the hard facts of Italian history. The essay stresses, in particular, the sinister capacity in which Italy, as a full-fledged Western democracy but at the same time a rather fragile one, anticipates larger trends which sooner or later will spread to the other countries of Western Europe. In this account, Italy should be actually regarded as a canary in a coal mine: an early warning system of the possible diseases that will sooner or later affect most advanced countries.