During the Renaissance, central–northern Italy was both Europe’s intellectual and artistic hub and its most prosperous economy. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century, the Italian economy drifted from center to periphery, in a long economic decline. During that decline, Italy was fragmented and subject to foreign occupations. Structural divides got deeper and a distance between citizens and public authorities emerged. We summarize the fruits of Italy’s “modern economic growth” since political unification through four periods in Italy’s transition from poverty to abundance: a) 1861–1896 slow growth and divergence from Western Europe’s leading economies, b) secular movement from “periphery” to the “center” of the developed world; 1896–1995 was a century of almost uninterrupted, if uneven, convergence with the world’s richest countries, c) 1995–2007 was a period of losing ground: slow growth and relative decline, d) 2008–2019 from relative to the absolute decline of the Italian economy.