Italy

In June of 1946, the citizens of Italy stood before cardboard ballot boxes, holding the fragile, dual-colored slips of a national referendum that would decide the soul of their state. To the north, the Alpine amphitheater, sweeping from Nice to the Gulf of Venice, stood as a silent, physical barrier that had witnessed centuries of fragmentation; to the south, the long, mountainous spine of the Apennines stretched down to the scorched tip of Calabria, terminating at Cape Spartivento. For eighty-five years, this vast, diverse geography had been held together under the single crown of the House of Savoy. Yet, as the nation emerged from the catastrophic ruin of the Second World War, the question on the ballot was deceptively simple: monarchy or republic. It was a choice that did not merely ask for a preference of government, but demanded a fundamental reckoning with a history characterized by imperial illusions, the trauma of totalitarianism, and the desperate yearning for a modern identity.

The land that faced this transition was one defined by its profound internal dualities. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire—which had once administrative-ly unified the peninsula and its islands of Sicily and Sardinia into a single metropole—political unity had been a fleeting stranger. The Lombards, Byzantines, Franks, and Normans had carved the territory into a patchwork of competing entities. In the north, medieval city-states like Milan, Florence, and Venice had birthed modern capitalism, banking, and the artistic triumphs of the Renaissance through commercial empires that reached deep into the Levant. In the south, Norman conquests had supplanted Arab emirates, leaving a landscape that remained agrarian, feudal, and increasingly isolated. Even after the wars of independence and the Expedition of the Thousand achieved political unification in 1861, these deep-seated regional differences persisted. While the north industrialized, tracing its wealth along the ancient path of the Aemilian Way from Rimini to Piacenza, the south languished in poverty, prompting a massive wave of migration across the Atlantic.

This fragile nineteenth-century kingdom sought to legitimize itself by pursuing the grandeur of its Roman past, acquiring a colonial empire and entering the mud and blood of the First World War alongside the Entente. But the strain of that conflict fractured the liberal state, paving the way for the rise of Benito Mussolini and the establishment of a fascist dictatorship in 1922. For over two decades, the monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel III coexisted with, and actively legitimized, the fascist regime. This disastrous partnership led the nation into the Second World War as part of the Axis alliance in 1940. When the tide turned, the King attempted to salvage the crown by arresting Mussolini and signing an armistice with the Allies in 1943. The consequence was a brutal, two-year civil war. The peninsula was sliced in half: a German occupation and a collaborationist puppet regime dominated the north, while the Allies advanced from the south, supported by a fierce domestic partisan resistance. By the time the country was fully liberated in 1945, the institutional authority of the monarchy was hopelessly compromised, stained by its complicity in the nation's descent into ruin.