All Western political systems are unique, but some are more unique than others. The Italian form of government may be similar to that of most parliamentary democracies in structure and constitutional principles, but in functioning and ethos it is fundamentally different. The most obvious difference is one of which Aldo Moro frequently spoke in the last years of his life: “We know that our system is characterized by limited change of government and is therefore, in contrast to other European systems, a difficult democracy.” The anomalies of government, in addition to the dark world of scandal, terrorism, and the mafia that are the staple of most media reports, make Italy a strange case in the European panorama.

Italian politics are, for all that, no impenetrable mystery. Their functioning follows remarkably clear patterns, and although these may be subtle and complex, they are deeply woven into the fabric of Italian life. In 1893 Vilfredo Pareto described the politics of the earliest years of the unified Italian state in an article, “The Parliamentary Regime in Italy,” for the Political Science Quarterly. The Italy of Pareto seems almost as distant as the Italy of Augustus. The political system he described, however, is astonishingly similar to that of Italy today. Such is the continuity that runs through Italian political life. It is epitomized in the celebrated passage in The Leopard of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: “If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.”