What Republic without police?

ABSTRACT While there are abundant studies of the Fascist police and historians have paid a great deal of attention to policing in Liberal Italy, the history of policing in the Republican period is still a neglected topic. Yet without taking account of the police it is impossible to understand much of the history of the Italian Republic; the police mirror the society, politics and culture of Republican Italy and much remains to be done in this field. What is needed is not an internal or institutional, history, but a social, political and cultural history. The brief introduction to this collection of articles aims to explain why certain case studies have been chosen and to show how, without adopting an ‘exceptionalist’ interpretation, many specificities of the Italian case emerge from studying the Italian police in the Republican period.