The international role and status of Italy among international powers has been an issue of debate in both the political and the academic context. What has never been systematically investigated is the way in which other powers with which Italy interacts in institutional contexts perceive Italy and its international role. It is the aim of this special issue to provide an overview of how Italy is perceived abroad. This introduction explains why it is worth looking at international images of Italy, and sums up the findings of the research project.

The American attentive foreign policy elite's perceptions of Italy as a foreign policy actor appear inconsistent with Italy's global role. The paradox of Italy's global status as a middle-power and the absence of status within the American foreign policy community raises three questions: What role should we expect Italy to play in American foreign policy calculations given its structural position in the international system? What role does Italy play in aiding or hindering American foreign policy objectives within the transatlantic community? Is there a disjunction between the American elite's subjectively low expectations for Italy as a foreign policy actor and Italy's objective importance for the successful realisation of American foreign policy objectives?

This article analyses Canadian perceptions of Italy at the governmental and societal levels. It argues that Canadians pay relatively little attention to things Italian and that their images of Italy are somewhat stereotypical. Italian politics do not receive much attention and when they do, domestic political aspects prevail over foreign policy ones. The Canadian press represents Italy as a country with a cultural and artistic past, an economic system that finds it difficult to adjust to globalisation and hence destined to decline, a corrupt political system and last, but not least, a society exhibiting many curious, and even bizarre, streaks.

Italy's relationship with Germany has undergone substantial changes over the last 20 years. Since 1989, the two countries, traditional allies and partners in the EU and NATO, have experienced a number of tensions. A crucial problem for Germany lies in its incapacity to accept fully Italy's ambitions to be a leading European power. In domestic terms, the perception of Italy has been heavily overshadowed by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi who has allowed familiar stereotypes to survive and impeded a sober analysis of Italy's changed preferences.

This article analyses the British perceptions of contemporary Italy and Italian politics. Through the use of a number of sources (parliamentary debates, governmental documents, newspaper articles and interviews) it argues that Italy is not perceived, within Great Britain, as a great power within the European system nor it is viewed as a peripheral actor. Rather, it suggests that Italy seems to have finally found in the post-Cold War scenario its proper role–a European middle power, with important responsibilities within a regional sub-system. A frequent request–and expectation–coming from British politics and society is that Italy should take on more international responsibilities, even in the sphere of defence–as the different readings of Italy's role and leadership in Afghanistan and Lebanon reveal. However, Italy's ability to play this role is believed to be hampered by several factors: its uncertain political situation, its unwillingness to engage in military operations, its reluctance to respect international commitments and its structural economic problems. As a result, further possibilities of cooperation with other international partners as well as its potential for autonomous action on the international stage are, in several cases, precluded. Moreover, if the relations between Italy and the UK are usually seen in a positive way, and Italy is viewed as a reliable partner, the nature of the cooperation between the two countries is often considered to be fragile and based on short-term common interests and strategies.

This article examines French–Italian relations focusing in particular on economic exchanges and French perceptions of Italy as revealed in parliamentary debates and in the French press. The analysis suggests that in the eyes of the French, Italy is a two-faced Janus, rich in both defects and positive qualities. Except perhaps for the shrewdest observers, it is difficult for the French to come to terms with all the subtleties and complexities of the real Italy.

The article analyses how Spanish perceptions of Italian domestic politics and its international role have changed over the last decade. The first part of the article presents an overview of the most significant fields of cooperation between the two countries and of the images of Italy in Spanish politics. There follows the reconstruction of non-institutional perceptions through an analysis of articles concerning Italy published by two major Spanish newspapers. The article concludes that the traditional image of Italy as a positive model to imitate has faded away and a more competitive attitude has emerged.

There have been many reflections on the relations between the judge and the historian which have concentrated on the differences between these two figures: but what happens in cases where an historian collaborates openly with a judge as an expert consultant? What happens when an investigative office, or a court, asks an historian to reconstruct an event which is subject to a judicial procedure, or when he or she has to pronounce the ‘last word’ on an event or a document? Or, in another possible scenario, what happens when a community asks an historian to pronounce on what happened in the past, in order to ascertain which, between two contesting memories of the representation of an event, is the one which corresponds to what ‘really happened’? In these cases historians are sought out to establish the truth–their professional skills as ‘truth experts’ are called upon. And there is an extraordinary faith that the truth will be discovered. The author reflects on these issues, using as a starting point his own personal experiences as a consultant in some recent Italian war-crimes trials.