In the course of the 1950s, Italian industrial design underwent a period of professionalisation and rose to international fame under the banners of ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘la linea italiana’. Seen in retrospect, Italian design retained this position during the 1960s, with the onset of avant-garde ‘pop-design’ and ‘anti-design’. Yet this future development was by no means a given in the Italian design community at the turn of the decade. At this crucial moment, between the rationality of the first postwar period and the playfulness of the second, allegations of a ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design raised a storm in the professional community for a brief period around 1960. This article analyses this heated debate, focusing on its most pronounced manifestation: the discussions in the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) and the design magazine Stile Industria following the jury's decision to withhold the Gran Premio Nazionale Compasso d'Oro for 1959.

This article examines the launch of the Tribuna elettorale and Tribuna politica programmes on Italian television (1960–1961), seen in the context of the country's broadcasting history and the changes in the political spectrum and governing alliances at that time. The changing face of political communications and leader–viewer relations may be the most interesting side to the Tribune, but also the most heavily studied. This article chooses instead to reconstruct the steps and reasons that led prime minister Fanfani in the autumn of 1960 to force through his decision to give all political parties airspace for political propaganda. The article argues that the Tribune programmes were only partly innovatory, a kind of ‘revolution that never was’. They were a first step towards democratising the public broadcasting corporation, but maintained firm links with the past and above all sought to legitimiste ‘government television’, as well as delaying structural reform of the medium in the face of mounting pressure on many sides. For the Christian Democrat (DC) and the RAI management, the Tribune programmes were a clever compromise solution, giving in terms of pluralism of information what they were not prepared to concede in terms of pluralism of management.

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

This article examines a number of the major works on Italy conducted by political scientists from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the research of Banfield, Almond and Verba, Tarrow and Putnam, it discusses the interpretations of Italy offered by these scholars and examines the contribution they have made to the political and intellectual debate surrounding the so-called ‘Italian case’. It concludes that the image presented of Italy by American researchers is generally critical and often simplified and stereotypical. Moreover, rather than highlighting the clichés frequently present in such accounts, Italian intellectuals have tended instead to use them in order to construct a wholly negative perspective of Italy and, in many instances, have distorted the original intentions of those American political scientists whose work is cited as evidence.

This article reflects on the reasons why clientelism has reached its status as a determining category in the scholarly interpretation of the Italian political system. By returning to the earliest formulations of the concept (in the controversies of the late nineteenth century on the widening of suffrage) and then its successive recreations up to the political crisis of the 1990s (as a typical manifestation of the political ‘anomalies’ of an ‘incomplete’ democracy), it relates this centrality to the uses made of the denunciation of clientelism in political and institutional struggles and the way political science has developed in Italy as an academic discipline.