1.
Prime Minister of Italy
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The office of Prime Minister is established by Articles 92 through to 96 of the Constitution of Italy. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President of the Republic after each general election, prior to the establishment of the Italian Republic, the position was called President of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Italy. King Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini from office in 1943 and the position was restored with Marshal Pietro Badoglio becoming Prime Minister in 1943, Alcide De Gasperi became the first Prime Minister of the Italian Republic in 1946. The Prime Minister is the President of the Council of Ministers—which holds executive power, the position is similar to those in most other parliamentary systems. The formal Italian order of precedence lists the office as being ceremonially the fourth most important Italian state office, as the President of the Council of Ministers the modern Prime Minister leads the Cabinet. In addition the Prime Minister leads a political party and generally commands the majority in the Parliament. Article 95 of the Italian constitution provides that the Prime Minister directs, the Prime Ministers activity has often consisted of mediating between the various parties in the majority coalition, rather than directing the activity of the Council of Ministers. The office was first established in 1848 in Italys predecessor state, the Kingdom of Sardinia—although it was not mentioned in its constitution, from 1848 to 1861 ten Prime Ministers governed the Kingdom, most of them being right-wing politicians. After the Unification of Italy and the establishment of the kingdom, in fact the candidate for office was appointed by the king, and presided over a very unstable political system. The first Prime Minister was Camillo Benso di Cavour, who was appointed on 23 March 1861, from 1861 to 1911 Historical Right and Left Prime Ministers alternatively governed the country. One of the most famous and influential Prime Ministers of this period was Francesco Crispi, a patriot and statesman. He led the country for six years, from 1887 until 1891, Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Bismarck, Gladstone and Salisbury. Originally an enlightened Italian patriot and democrat liberal, he went on to become a bellicose authoritarian prime minister, ally, and admirer of Bismarck. His career ended amid controversy and failure due to becoming involved in a banking scandal. He is often seen as a precursor of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, in 1892 Giovanni Giolitti, a young leftist politician, was elected Prime Minister by king Umberto I, but after less than a year he was forced to resign and Crispi returned to power. In 1903 after a period of instability he was appointed head of the government. Giolitti was the Prime Minister five times between 1892 and 1921 and the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Mussolini, under his influence, the Italian Liberals did not develop as a structured party. They were instead a series of informal personal groupings with no links to political constituencies
2.
Francesco Cossiga
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Francesco Cossiga, OMRI was an Italian politician of the Christian Democracy party. He was the 42nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1979 to 1980 and he was also a professor of constitutional law at the University of Sassari. Cossiga was born in Sassari in northern Sardinia and he started his political career during World War II. His name is now pronounced, but it was originally pronounced, with the stress on the first syllable, meaning Corsica in Sardinian. He was the cousin of Enrico Berlinguer and he was a minister several times for the Democrazia Cristiana party, notably during his stay at Viminale where he re-structured the Italian police, civil protection and secret services. He was in office at the time of the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by Red Brigades, and resigned as Minister of the Interior when Moro was found dead in 1978. According to Italian journalist Enrico Deaglio, Cossiga, to justify his lack of action, accused the leaders of CGIL, Cossiga was also minister of internal affairs when Fascist terrorists bombed Bologna station in 1980. Francesco Cossiga first assumed the explosion to have been caused by an accident, Cossiga was elected President of the Italian Senate 12 July 1983, a position he held until 24 June 1985, when he became the President of Italy. Following his resignation as president of the Senate in 1985, Cossiga was elected as President of Italy and this was the first time an Italian presidential candidate had won on the first ballot. It was not until his last two years as President that Cossiga began to some unusual opinions regarding the Italian political system. He opined that the Italian parties, especially the DC and Italian Communist Party, had to take account the deep changes brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cossiga suffered from bipolar disorder and depression in the last years of his life, tension developed between Cossiga and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Cossiga acknowledged his involvement in the establishment of the organization, the Democratic Party of the Left started the procedure of impeachment. Although he threatened to prevent the impeachment procedure by dissolving Parliament, Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term, on 25 April 1992. In February 1998, Cossiga created the Unione Democratica per la Repubblica, the UDR was a crucial component of the majority that supported the DAlema government in October 1998, after the fall of the Prodi government which lost a vote of confidence. Cossiga declared that his support for DAlema was intended to end the exclusion of the former Communist Party leaders from the premiership in Italy. In 1999 UDR was dissolved and Cossiga returned to his activities as a senator, on 27 November 2006, he resigned from his position as a lifetime senator. His resignation was, however, rejected on 31 January 2007 by a vote of the Senate, Cossiga died on 17 August 2010 from respiratory problems
3.
Amintore Fanfani
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Amintore Fanfani was an Italian politician and the Prime Minister of Italy for five separate runs. Fanfani and the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti still hold the record as the only statesmen to have served as Prime Minister of Italy in five non-consecutive periods of office. Fanfani was one of the dominant figures of the Italian Christian Democrats for over three decades and he is considered one of the most important and influential politicians in Italian history. Fanfani was born in Pieve Santo Stefano, in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, to a large and he graduated in economics and business in 1932 at the Università Cattolica in Milan. He was the author of a number of important works on economic history dealing with religion and his thesis was published in Italian and then in English as Catholicism, Capitalism and Protestantism in 1935. He joined the National Fascist Party supporting the corporatist ideas of the regime promoting collaboration between the classes, which he defended in many articles, some day, he once wrote, the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles and he also wrote for the official magazine of racism in Fascist Italy, The Defence of the Race. Fanfani also became a professor at the School of Fascist Mysticism in Milan and this work brought him to the forefront among US Catholics, especially was much appreciated by John F. Kennedy. During the years he spent in Milan, he knew Giuseppe Dossetti and they formed a group known as the little professors who lived ascetically in monastery cells and walked barefoot. After the surrender of Italy with the Allied armed forces on 8 September 1943, until the Liberation in April 1945, Fanfani fled to Switzerland dodging military service, and organized university courses for Italian refugees. Upon his return to Italy, he was elected vice-secretary of the newly founded Christian Democratic Party and he was as one of the youngest party leaders and a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, the undisputed leader of the party for the following decade. There is a gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life. Private economic initiative, in his view, was only if harnessed to the common good. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and was a member of the Commission that drafted the text of the new Republican Constitution, the first article of the new constitution reflected Fanfanis philosophy. He proposed an article, which read, Italy is a republic founded on labor. In 1948 he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, under De Gasperi, Fanfani took on a succession of ministries. He was Minister of Labour from 1947–1948 and again from 1948–1950, Minister of Agriculture from 1951–1953, as Minister of Labour, he developed the Fanfani house program for government-built workers homes and put 200,000 of Italys many unemployed to work on a reforestation program. As Minister of Agriculture, he set in motion much of the Christian Democrats land reform program, on 28 February 1949 Fanfani launched a seven-year plan for popular housing to increase the stock of economic housing by means of construction or purchase of economic accommodation
4.
Bettino Craxi
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Benedetto Bettino Craxi was an Italian politician, leader of the Italian Socialist Party from 1976 to 1993 and Prime Minister of Italy from 1983 to 1987. He was the first member of the PSI to hold the office and he led the third-longest government in the Italian Republic, and he is considered one of the most powerful and prominent politicians of the so-called First Republic. Craxi was involved in investigations conducted by Mani Pulite judges in Milan, eventually being convicted for corruption, Craxis govermment and party were also supported by future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate and personal friend of Craxi. Bettino Craxi maintained strong links with many leaders of the European left, including Felipe González, Bettino Craxi was born in Milan on 24 February 1934. His father, Vittorio Craxi, was a Sicilian lawyer and anti-fascist who was persecuted by the regime of Benito Mussolini, his mother, Maria Ferrari, was a housewife from SantAngelo Lodigiano. After the war Vittorio Craxi assumed the role of vice-prefect in Milan and then the prefect in Como, a few months later Bettino returned to the college, first in Como and then in Cantù, arriving in a step by start the seminary. Vittorio Craxi stood in the 1948 general election for the Popular Democratic Front, Bettino campaigned for his father and later joined the Italian Socialist Party at the age of 17. Craxi was precocious and ascended to many levels of office at an early age. In November 1956 he was elected councilor in SantAngelo Lodigiano from. In 1961 he was excluded from the Central Committee of the Socialist Party by the new Secretary Francesco De Martino, in 1963 he was appointed leader of the Milan Provincial Secretariat of the PSI and in 1965 Craxi became a member of the National Leadership. Meanwhile in November 1964, he was re-elected city councilor in Milan, continuing his public commitment as assessor for Charity, in 1968 general election Craxi was elected for the first time at the Chamber of Deputies with 23,788 votes, in the constituency of Milan–Pavia. Nel 1970 after the end of the PSU alliance, Craxi became Vice Secretary of the PSI, in 1976 the Secretary Francesco De Martino wrote an article in the Socialist newspaper Avanti. Instead for the PSI those elections were a crushing defeat, the votes went down under the threshold of 10%, De Martino, pointing to a new alliance with the Communists, was forced to resign and opened a serious crisis within the party. Bettino Craxi was appointed to the vacant position of National Secretary of the party, ironically, the old guard saw him as short-lived leader, allowing each faction time to regroup. However, he was able to power and implement his policies. He outlined for a line of alternation between the DC and the left-wing, represented by his party, due to the relations between the PCI and the Soviet Union. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moros bodyguards and kidnapped him, in 1978 Craxi decided to change the party logo of the party. He chose a red carnation to represent the new course of the party, the party shrank the size of the old hammer and sickle in the lower part of the symbol
5.
Giulio Andreotti
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Andreotti is widely considered the most powerful and prominent politician of the so-called First Republic. In foreign policy, he guided Italys European Union integration, admirers of Andreotti saw him as having mediated political and social contradictions, enabling the transformation of a substantially rural country into the fifth-biggest economy in the world. Critics said he had nothing against a system of patronage that had led to pervasive corruption. At the height of his prestige as a statesman, Andreotti was subjected to damaging criminal prosecutions, charged with colluding with Cosa Nostra, courts found he had broken the links by the 1980s, and ruled the case out of time. The most sensational allegation came from prosecutors in Perugia, who charged him with ordering the murder of a journalist and he was found guilty at a trial, which led to complaints that the justice system had gone mad. Definitively acquitted by the court, Andreotti remarked, Apart from the Punic Wars, for which I was too young. Andreotti served as the 41st Prime Minister of Italy from 1972 to 1973, from 1976 to 1979 and he also served as Minister of the Interior, Defence Minister and Foreign Minister and was a Senator for life from 1991 until his death in 2013. He was also a journalist and author, Andreotti was sometimes called Divo Giulio. During the 16th term of the Senate in 2008–13, he opted to join the parliamentary group UDC – independence, Giulio Andreotti, the youngest of three children, was born on 14 January 1919 in Rome. His father was a school teacher from Segni, a small town in Lazio. Andreotti attended the Liceo Torquato Tasso in Rome and graduated in Law at the University of Rome and he showed some ferocity as a youth, once stubbing out a lit taper in the eye of another altar boy who was ridiculing him. His mother was described as not very affectionate, and an aunt is said to have advised him to remember that few things in life are important, as an adult he was described as having a somewhat unusual demeanor for an Italian politician, being mild-mannered and unassuming. Andreotti did not use his influence to advance his children to prominence, see all, tolerate much, and correct one thing at a time, was a quote that emphasised what has been called his art of the possible view of politics. Andreotti was known for his discretion and retentive memory, and also a sense of humour, Andreotti did not shine at his school and started work in a tax office while studying law at the University of Rome. In this period he became a member of the Italian Catholic Federation of University Students and its members included many of the future leaders of the Italian Christian Democracy. In 1938 while researching the papal navy in the Vatican library, he met Alcide De Gasperi, De Gasperi asked Andreotti if he had nothing better to do with his time, inspiring him to become politically active. Speaking of De Gasperi, Andreotti said, He taught us to search for compromise, in July 1939, while Aldo Moro was president of FUCI, Andreotti became director of its magazine Azione Fucina. In 1942, when Moro was enrolled in the Italian Army, Andreotti succeeded him as president of FUCI, during his early years Andreotti suffered violent migraines that forced him to sporadically make use of psychoactive drugs and opiates
6.
Asti
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Asti listen is a city and comune of about 75,000 inhabitants located in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, about 55 kilometres east of Turin in the plain of the Tanaro River. It is the capital of the province of Asti and it is deemed to be the capital of Monferrato. People have lived in and around what is now Asti since the Neolithic period, before their defeat in 174 BC by the Romans, tribes of Ligures, the Statielli, dominated the area and the toponym probably derives from Ast which means hill in the ancient Celtic language. In 124 BC the Romans built a castrum, or fortified camp, in 89 BC the city received the status of colonia, and in 49 BC that of municipium. Asti become an important city of the Augustan Regio IX, favoured by its position on the Tanaro river and on the Via Fulvia. Other roads connected the city to the passes for what are today Switzerland. The city was crucial during the stages of the barbarian invasions which stormed Italy during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In early 402 AD the Visigoths had invaded northern Italy and were advancing on Mediolanum which was the capital at that time. Honorius, the emperor and a resident in that city. However, just after his convoy had left Milan and crossed the River Po his escape route through the Alps was cut off by the Gothic cavalry and this forced him to take emergency refuge in the city of Hasta until more Roman troops could be assembled in Italy. The Goths placed Hasta under siege until March when General Stilicho, bringing reinforcements from the Rhine, fought, in the second half of the 6th century it was chosen as seat for one of the 36 Duchies in which the Lombards divided Italy. The territory of Asti comprised an area, stretching out to Albenga. This remained when northern Italy was conquered by the Franks in 774, in the late Carolingian age Asti was ruled directly by his bishops, who were the main landlords of the area. Most important are Audax and Bruningus, who moved the seat to the Castel Vecchio. The bishopric of Asti remained a powerful entity well into the 11th century, in the second half of the century, Bishop Otto tried to resist the aims of the powerful countess Adelaide of Susa, who damaged the city several times. During Ottos reign, a commune and the magistrates are mentioned for the first time. Asti was one of the first free communes of Italy, after a short siege, Asti was stormed and burnt. Subsequently, Asti adhered to the Lombard League against the German emperor, despite this, after the Peace of Constance, the city gained further privileges
7.
Piedmont
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Piedmont is one of the 20 regions of Italy. It has an area of 25,402 square kilometres and a population of about 4.6 million, the capital of Piedmont is Turin. The name Piedmont comes from medieval Latin Pedemontium or Pedemontis, i. e. ad pedem montium, meaning “at the foot of the mountains”. Other towns of Piedmont with more than 20,000 inhabitants sorted by population and it borders with France, Switzerland and the Italian regions of Lombardy, Liguria, Aosta Valley and for a very small fragment with Emilia Romagna. The geography of Piedmont is 43. 3% mountainous, along with areas of hills. Piedmont is the second largest of Italys 20 regions, after Sicily and it is broadly coincident with the upper part of the drainage basin of the river Po, which rises from the slopes of Monviso in the west of the region and is Italy’s largest river. The Po collects all the waters provided within the semicircle of mountains which surround the region on three sides, from the highest peaks the land slopes down to hilly areas, and then to the upper, and then to the lower great Padan Plain. 7. 6% of the territory is considered protected area. There are 56 different national or regional parks, one of the most famous is the Gran Paradiso National Park located between Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, Piedmont was inhabited in early historic times by Celtic-Ligurian tribes such as the Taurini and the Salassi. They were later subdued by the Romans, who founded several colonies there including Augusta Taurinorum, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was repeatedly invaded by the Burgundians, the Goths, Byzantines, Lombards, Franks. In the 9th–10th centuries there were incursions by the Magyars. At the time Piedmont, as part of the Kingdom of Italy within the Holy Roman Empire, was subdivided into several marks, in 1046, Oddo of Savoy added Piedmont to their main territory of Savoy, with a capital at Chambéry. Other areas remained independent, such as the powerful comuni of Asti and Alessandria, the County of Savoy was elevated to a duchy in 1416, and Duke Emanuele Filiberto moved the seat to Turin in 1563. In 1720, the Duke of Savoy became King of Sardinia, founding what evolved into the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Republic of Alba was created in 1796 as a French client republic in Piedmont. A new client republic, the Piedmontese Republic, existed between 1798 and 1799 before it was reoccupied by Austrian and Russian troops, in June 1800 a third client republic, the Subalpine Republic, was established in Piedmont. It fell under full French control in 1801 and it was annexed by France in September 1802, in the congress of Vienna, the Kingdom of Sardinia was restored, and furthermore received the Republic of Genoa to strengthen it as a barrier against France. Piedmont was a springboard for Italys unification in 1859–1861, following earlier unsuccessful wars against the Austrian Empire in 1820–1821 and this process is sometimes referred to as Piedmontisation. However, the efforts were countered by the efforts of rural farmers
8.
Kingdom of Italy
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The state was founded as a result of the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which can be considered its legal predecessor state. Italy declared war on Austria in alliance with Prussia in 1866, Italian troops entered Rome in 1870, ending more than one thousand years of Papal temporal power. Italy entered into a Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882, victory in the war gave Italy a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations. Fascist Italy is the era of National Fascist Party rule from 1922 to 1943 with Benito Mussolini as head of government, according to Payne, Fascist regime passed through several relatively distinct phases. The first phase was nominally a continuation of the parliamentary system, then came the second phase, the construction of the Fascist dictatorship proper from 1925 to 1929. The third phase, with activism, was 1929–34. The war itself was the phase with its disasters and defeats. Italy was allied with Nazi Germany in World War II until 1943 and it switched sides to the Allies after ousting Mussolini and shutting down the Fascist party in areas controlled by the Allied invaders. Shortly after the war, civil discontent led to the referendum of 1946 on whether Italy would remain a monarchy or become a republic. Italians decided to abandon the monarchy and form the Italian Republic, the Kingdom of Italy claimed all of the territory which is modern-day Italy. The development of the Kingdoms territory progressed under Italian re-unification until 1870, the state for a long period of time did not include Trieste or Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, which are in Italy today, and only annexed them in 1919. After the Second World War, the borders of present-day Italy were founded, the Kingdom of Italy was theoretically a constitutional monarchy. Executive power belonged to the monarch, as executed through appointed ministers, two chambers of parliament restricted the monarchs power—an appointive Senate and an elective Chamber of Deputies. The kingdoms constitution was the Statuto Albertino, the governing document of the Kingdom of Sardinia. In theory, ministers were responsible to the king. However, in practice, it was impossible for an Italian government to stay in office without the support of Parliament, members of the Chamber of Deputies were elected by plurality voting system elections in uninominal districts. A candidate needed the support of 50% of those voting, and of 25% of all enrolled voters, if not all seats were filled on the first ballot, a runoff was held shortly afterwards for the remaining vacancies. After a brief multinominal experimentation in 1882, proportional representation into large, regional, Socialists became the major party, but they were unable to form a government in a parliament split into three different factions, with Christian Populists and classical liberals
9.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
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