Overview
The referendum was close — about 12.7 million votes for a republic against 10.7 million for the monarchy — and it was the first national vote in which Italian women took part. Umberto II left the country after a month on the throne, and an elected assembly wrote the constitution that came into force on 1 January 1948. Italy was a founding member of the European communities and signed the treaty that created the Common Market in Rome in 1957; the party system built in those first years lasted until the corruption investigations of the early 1990s swept most of it away.
Key developments
Italy became a founding member of NATO (1949) and of the European Communities (Treaty of Rome, 1957), and its postwar “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s turned it into an industrial power known for cars, fashion, and design. Political life was marked by frequent changes of government, the terrorism of the “Years of Lead” in the 1970s (when former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed in 1978), and the Mani Pulite corruption investigations of the early 1990s, which swept away the old party system.
End and transition
Italy adopted the euro as a founding member and remains a G7 economy and central European Union member, facing debt, demographic, and migration challenges into the present.