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Lawyers have widely been recognized as playing a role in the transition from the medieval to the modem state. Their presence in Renaissance Venetian politics, however, remains largely unexplored. Relying primarily on a prosopographical analysis, the thesis explores the various roles played by lawyers, dividing those roles into three main categories: diplomats, territorial governors, and domestic legislators. What emerges is a clear pattern of significant involvement by legally trained patricians in the Venetian political system. Noble lawyers were most often ambassadors, serving in many of the principal courts inside and outside of Italy as Venice was extending her influence on the Italian peninsula. They also served as administrators of Venetian rule throughout the Venetian terraferma (mainland) state. Lastly, their domestic political officeholding further confirms their continuing participation, as they held many of the most important domestic offices throughout the Quattrocento. The thesis ends with short biographies of each of the nearly three-dozen lawyers who make up this study, as well as chronologies of the offices they held. These chronologies include archival references for each office.

This project is an attempt to define both culture and political culture, and thus enable Italian subcultures to be identified. The paper discusses the "meaning" of political subcultures regarding the levels and styles of political participation in Italy_ It does so primarily from a sociohistorical perspective. It also offers a critique of the methods of analysis commonly used in Political Science. The aim of the first part is to offer a reliable theoretical background concerning the operationalization of the concept Culture. In the second part of this paper, I describe and analyze the influences of state formation on Italian political culture and subcultures. The third part of the paper is a quantitative analysis of the regional Italian subcultures. The statistical procedure is interesting and confirms the conclusions drawn from the socio-historical analysis. It shows that socio-historical forces do have tenacious influences on the levels and styles of political participation in Italy. / Master of Arts

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) emerged from the chaos of the Italian defeat in 1943 as a powerful and cohesive movement. Based upon organizational development throughout the years of Fascist rule in Italy, plus a combination of vigorous partisan activities and a willingness to compromise politically in exchange for governmental participation, the PCI showed promise for achieving economic and social change in Italy. Conservative countermeasures and Allied pressures, however, diminished the Communist advantage until, by 1947, the Party was no longer represented in the postwar government. The success apparent in the economic arena due to the Christian Democrat's program initiated in their monocolore government of 1947 and an East-West demarcation internationally, with the Soviets gaining control in Eastern Europe, created for the general elections of April, 1948 an atmosphere ripe for Christian Democrat exploitation. The election was disastrous for the PCI; the combined Communist-Socialist ticket drew slightly in excess of four million votes, one million fewer than the coalition had gathered in the 1946 elections.

A genuine and conscious Italian nationalism began to manifest itself during the Napoleonic era, and Vincenzo Cuoco was the apostle of this first revival of national consciousness. All of his writings, focussed on the urgent need for a free and independent Italy, aim at the renewal of "public spirit," an indispensable step towards the achievement of the country's unification and freedom through its own energies. / The purpose of our thesis is thus twofold. On the one hand, we wish to emphasize Cuoco's constant preoccupation with the shaping of the future Italian nation, through a large-scale re-education of the public, in order to re-integrate the lower classes, the common people, and raise them to a reasonable degree of civil consciousness. On the other hand, we shall attempt to bring out the internal unity of Cuoco's writings, which are not the product of a random inspiration, but rather constitute an organic whole, a systematic program of moral and political reconstruction of the Italian nation.

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