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This article examines the political movements that from the end of the Second World War until 2018 have explicitly inscribed themselves in the tradition of anti-fascism: the women who built nursery schools in Emilia Romagna; the young people with the 'striped T-shirts'; the students of 1968; the protesters who mobilized on 25 April 1994 to defend the values of the Resistance and the constitution after Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power; the 'Panther'. Finally, it will examine a wide arc of political actors – including immigrants – who united anti-racism and anti-fascism after Luca Traini's 2018 attempted massacre in Macerata. The article highlights how, over the decades, anti-fascism has proven to be a generative resource: it has not only been transmitted to new generations and new social actors, but has also been given new meaning over time to address new questions coming from the present. The fascism evoked has never been an eternal and a-historical phenomenon or a simulacrum of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As many historians suggest, the collapse of the Italian party system in the early 1990s was the result of dynamics that had troubled the political system in the previous decade. This Special Issue examines the parties' views on the loss of their capacity for representation and governance in the 1980s. The focus is on how aware the political actors themselves were of the 'crisis' of the political system and the need for reform of some of its aspects/articulations, what strategies of delegitimization of the system they themselves had aimed at, and, possibly, what strategies they put in place or attempted to put in place to get out of the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) is central to any history of the crisis of Italy's post-war system of party democracy. The party seemed to be in its death throes during the mid-1970s, but under the new leadership of Bettino Craxi, elected in 1976, the party made a surprisingly successful political comeback. However, in the early 1990s, the party's success quickly evaporated. It became the face of the Tangentopoli scandals as many Socialist politicians, including Craxi, were convicted for corruption. The party even disbanded itself in 1994. This article traces the transformation of the Italian Socialists through the 1980s, looking at their ideology, organization and mode of representation. It connects these changes with the party's electoral fortunes, showing how they ultimately contributed to the party's demise, which had repercussions for Italy's party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rich italian historiography related to the most dramatic feature of the seventies – the black and red terrorisms – risks identifiying this decade only as 'the night of the Republic'. In the same period, on the other hand, another Italy elevated and nourished its democratic conscience, active political participation and civic awereness and achieved significant individual as well collective rights and freedoms. Its protagonists came from the same younger generation of those who lost themselves in ideological extremism, destroying own lives and that of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]