25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: Symbolic dates of the Past and Italy’s Transition, in Italy 1990-2014. The Transition that never happened

The twenty-year political period on which this paper focuses opened and closed with two highly symbolic commemorations. On 25 April 1994, just a few weeks after the electoral victoryof the political alliance led by Silvio Berlusiconi (Pole of Liberty), more than 500,000 people took to the streets to commemorate the anti-Fascist foundations of the post-war Italian Republic: thiswas a timely reaction that ran counter to the climate of disaffection that since the 1980s had marked the annual celebrations of the Liberation. The second commemoration was on the night of 11 March 2011, when thousands of citizens took part in the ‘All NightTricolor’ parties that marked the start of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. The scale of popular participation was in part a response to President Ciampi’s commitment to re-launching a sense of ‘civil religion’, to the variety of ways in which the event was turned into a spectacle and the work of the organizing committee. But it also reflected the ways in which the significance of the commemoration of the distant founding of the Kingdom of Italywas considered to be ‘above’ (even ‘anti’) party politics. Both commemorations were rooted deeply in Italian history but took place in very different institutional circumstances: this essays compares the two commemorations and how they illustrate the changing political cultures in the time of the Italian transition