The Constitution of the Italian Republic

At the beginning of 1948, Italy's first republican constitution went into effect. After exactly a century, the Statuto of 1848 was finally and formally superseded. History will record that the Statuto proved a powerful instrument in the formation of Italian unity and in the development of Italy's freedoms and parliamentary system until 1922, just as it will also be a witness to its rejection and nullification in the course of the subsequent twenty-five years. The new republican constitution represents the first deliberate effort by the Italian people as a whole to guarantee their freedom and common welfare within a constitutional framework. The influences of many lands are visible in the document. One can see in the rebirth of regionalism the native historical tradition of municipal freedom; the French fear of Caesarism reflected in election of the president by Parliament rather than by the people; British reliance on a balance of power between executive and legislature translated into the almost unlimited executive power of dissolution of the chambers; the time-honored American principle of bicameralism accepted with the creation of two legislative houses of equal power; and the equally famous American doctrine of judicial review tentatively imitated through the establishment of a Constitutional Court. Of Eastern constitutionalism there are only scant traces, the new social and economic rights reflecting rather the general trends of the times than any overt allegiance to the tenets of the Soviet constitution. Indeed, the acceptance of the new has been tempered by a strong restatement of what is valid in the individualistic and liberal traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.