Una o divisibile? La questione regionale e il nodo del federalismo in Italia

United or Disunited? The Regional Question and the issue of Federalism in Italy - This article deals with Italy’s regional crisis arising from the petitions – filed in the country over the last years – in favour of a transformation from the Italian centralized unitary system into a Federal form of government. This work reconstructs the origins of the regional question and its political-administrative decentralization since the Unity of Italy. It focuses mainly on the territorial responses and the high points of the debate developing during the XIX century between “Unitarians” and “Federalists”. In particular, we discuss Carlo Cattaneo’s argument over the creation of an actual autonomy of territorial communities generating the construction of the United Kingdoms of Italy. Outlining the genesis and the evolution of the Italian regions as space of government, this paper aims at identifying the practices of distribution, largely spread by cartographic representations. Moreover, it takes into consideration the persistence of such regional designs in Italians’ collective imagination. Finally, it reconstructs the basic events of Italian regions – a process delayed for several years – from the Union to Fascism, to the second post-war period, until their actual institution in the Seventies. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, following the crisis caused by “Tangentopoli” (aka bribesville), Northern League movements and Berlusconi ‘personal party’ began to gain ground powerfully. In 2001, the changing political scene led to the approval of a constitutional amendment, introducing a concurrent legislation between State and Regions. The new legal frameworks resulting from a partial institutional revision in Italy can also be seen as the consequence of a controversial regionalization, opposing the historical “Southern question” to the merging of a new “Northern question”. Finally, the work questions some fundamental issues emerging from the difficult transition from a Regional State to a Federal one, in this contemporary late-capitalist critical age.