---
node: modern_italy
type: period
slug: modern_italy
title: "Modern Italy"
lead: "Modern Italy has been a republic since the referendum of 2 June 1946, governed under a constitution that took effect in 1948."
published: 2026-07-11
updated: 2026-08-27
change: "Rewrote the opening body section so that it no longer restates the page's own lead."
previous_hash: "2713d94b310a9494fac21a1b254415b4d5ffe31e9ed2553d69e96152b7cbea17"
requester: internal
reason: "The section repeated the lead, so the first thing under the first heading was text the reader had already read in the search result."
image_file: modern_italy.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Altar_della_Patria_September_2015-1.jpg"
image_author: "Alvesgaspar"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

## Overview

The referendum was close — about 12.7 million votes for a republic against 10.7 million for the monarchy — and it was the first national vote in which Italian women took part. Umberto II left the country after a month on the throne, and an elected assembly wrote the constitution that came into force on 1 January 1948. Italy was a founding member of the European communities and signed the treaty that created the Common Market in Rome in 1957; the party system built in those first years lasted until the corruption investigations of the early 1990s swept most of it away.

## Key developments

Italy became a founding member of NATO (1949) and of the European Communities (Treaty of Rome, 1957), and its postwar "economic miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s turned it into an industrial power known for cars, fashion, and design. Political life was marked by frequent changes of government, the terrorism of the "Years of Lead" in the 1970s (when former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed in 1978), and the Mani Pulite corruption investigations of the early 1990s, which swept away the old party system.

## End and transition

Italy adopted the euro as a founding member and remains a G7 economy and central European Union member, facing debt, demographic, and migration challenges into the present.