Italy is a unitary parliamentary republic whose government rests on the Constitution that came into force on 1 January 1948. The head of state is the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, first elected on 31 January 2015 and re-elected on 29 January 2022. The head of government is the Prime Minister, formally the President of the Council of Ministers, a post held by Giorgia Meloni since 22 October 2022, the first woman in the job. Laws are made by a two-chamber Parliament of 400 deputies and 200 elected senators, and the government stays in office only while it keeps Parliament’s confidence. A Constitutional Court checks laws against the 1948 text, and 20 regions, five of them with special autonomy, share power with Rome.
From the Albertine Statute of 1848 to the referendum of 2 June 1946
The 1948 Constitution replaced a document exactly a century older. The Statuto Albertino was granted by King Charles Albert to the Kingdom of Sardinia on 4 March 1848 and became the fundamental law of the Kingdom of Italy when the country, newly unified, was proclaimed on 17 March 1861. It was a flexible text that ordinary laws could change, and that weakness let Benito Mussolini turn the office of prime minister into a dictatorial "Head of the Government" between 1925 and 1943 without formally abolishing the old charter. King Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini in July 1943, and the defeat of Fascism discredited the House of Savoy that had tolerated him.
On 2 June 1946, Italians, women included for the first time in a national vote, were asked whether to keep the monarchy. The Court of Cassation proclaimed the result on 10 June: 12,717,923 votes for a republic and 10,719,284 for the monarchy. The vote was not held in the provinces of Bolzano, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, Fiume and Zara, which were still under Allied administration. The anniversary is celebrated every year as Festa della Repubblica.
The Constituent Assembly and the text approved on 22 December 1947
On the same day as the referendum, voters elected a Constituent Assembly of 556 members, 21 of them women. It was dominated by three anti-fascist currents: the Christian Democrats, the liberals and the left, including Communists and Socialists. Having lived through two decades of dictatorship, they agreed on a framework that put legislative power first and made the executive depend on it. Historians call the result the "constitutional compromise": Catholic ideas shaped the articles on marriage and the family, while socialist and communist delegates shaped the articles on work.
The Assembly approved the text on 22 December 1947 by 453 votes to 62. It was promulgated in a special edition of the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 27 December and took effect on 1 January 1948. The document has 139 articles, five of them later repealed, arranged in three parts: the Fundamental Principles (Articles 1 to 12), the Rights and Duties of Citizens (Articles 13 to 54) and the Organisation of the Republic (Articles 55 to 139), followed by 18 transitional provisions.
Articles 1, 7, 12 and 139: the clauses that define the Republic
Article 1 declares Italy a democratic republic founded on labour and places sovereignty with the people, exercised within the limits of the Constitution. The Fundamental Principles go on to guarantee equality regardless of sex, race, language, religion or political opinion, to protect linguistic minorities and local autonomy, and to repudiate war as a tool of aggression. Article 7 recognises the State and the Catholic Church as independent in their own spheres and incorporates the Lateran Treaty of 1929, revised by a new agreement in 1984. Article 12 fixes the national flag as the green, white and red tricolour in three equal vertical bands.
Two clauses at the end protect the whole structure. Article 138 makes amendment deliberately slow, and Article 139 states that the republican form of government cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, closing the door on any legal restoration of the monarchy. Because the Constitution has supra-legislative force, an ordinary law that conflicts with it can be struck down.
The President at the Quirinal Palace: Sergio Mattarella since 2015
Article 84 requires the head of state to be an Italian citizen aged at least 50. The president is not chosen by voters but by an electoral college of all members of Parliament plus 58 delegates from the regions, voting by secret ballot in Palazzo Montecitorio. A two-thirds majority is needed in the first three rounds and an absolute majority after that. The term is seven years, longer than a parliament, and has no limit; Giorgio Napolitano in 2013 and Mattarella in 2022 both accepted second terms to break deadlocks.
Most presidential acts must be countersigned by a minister, so day-to-day power lies with the government. Yet the office matters. The president appoints the prime minister, can dissolve Parliament, promulgates laws and may send a bill back for reconsideration once, appoints five of the fifteen constitutional judges and up to five senators for life, and chairs the High Council of the Judiciary. When no party has a clear majority, the president’s choice of prime minister becomes decisive, as it was when Napolitano appointed Mario Monti in 2011. Mattarella, a former constitutional judge from Palermo, is the longest-serving president in the Republic’s history. He lives and works in the Quirinal Palace on the highest of Rome’s seven hills, a building that has housed thirty popes, four kings and twelve presidents.
Giorgia Meloni and the Council of Ministers at Palazzo Chigi
Articles 92 to 96 create the government: the Prime Minister and the ministers who together form the Council of Ministers. The president appoints the prime minister and, on the prime minister’s proposal, the ministers, and the new government must then win a confidence vote in both houses. It can be brought down by either. The government can issue decree-laws in urgent cases, but they lapse after 60 days unless Parliament converts them into law. The prime minister sits in Palazzo Chigi on Piazza Colonna, next door to the Chamber of Deputies.
This dependence on Parliament explains Italy’s reputation for short-lived cabinets. Alcide De Gasperi became the Republic’s first prime minister in 1946, and the Meloni government, sworn in on 22 October 2022, is the 68th since then. It is a centre-right coalition led by Brothers of Italy with the League and Forza Italia, and in September 2026 it became the longest-serving government in the Republic’s history.
Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama: a 600-seat Parliament since 2022
Italy has what lawyers call perfect bicameralism: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic have identical powers, every bill must pass both in the same wording, and each can withdraw confidence from the government. The Chamber meets in Palazzo Montecitorio and has been presided over by Lorenzo Fontana since 14 October 2022. The Senate meets in Palazzo Madama, and its president, Ignazio La Russa, was elected in the first round on 13 October 2022 with 116 votes.
From 1963 to 2022 the Chamber had 630 members and the Senate 315 elected senators. The 2020 constitutional referendum cut them to 400 and 200, a change first applied at the election of 25 September 2022. Eight deputies and four senators are elected by Italians living abroad. A further amendment in 2021 lowered the voting age for the Senate from 25 to 18, so both houses now share the same electorate. Former presidents sit in the Senate for life, alongside up to five citizens appointed by the president for outstanding merit. Members of both houses serve five-year terms unless Parliament is dissolved early.
Both houses are elected under the 2017 electoral law known as the Rosatellum, after the Democratic Party politician Ettore Rosato. It is a parallel system: about 37% of seats are won in single-member constituencies by plurality and 63% by proportional lists. In 2022 it turned 44% of the vote for the centre-right coalition into an absolute majority in both houses, because the coalition took 83% of the single-member seats. Brothers of Italy, with 26%, became the largest party in Parliament.
The Constitutional Court, 20 regions and five referendums under Article 138
The Constitutional Court, often called the Consulta after the palace where it sits, was provided for in 1948 but held its first hearing only in 1956. Its 15 judges serve nine-year terms: five appointed by the president, five elected by Parliament in joint session and five by the supreme ordinary and administrative courts. It rules on whether national and regional laws conform to the Constitution, settles conflicts between the State and the regions, and admits or rejects requests for popular referendums. It has struck down parts of two electoral laws, the Porcellum of 2005 and the Italicum of 2015.
Below the national level are 20 regions. Article 116 gives special statutes to five: the Aosta Valley, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, mostly to protect linguistic minorities and to secure border areas after the Second World War. The other fifteen elected their first councils only in 1970. Our guide to Italy’s regions lists them all with their capitals.
Changing the Constitution takes two votes in each house at least three months apart. If the second vote reaches an absolute majority but falls short of two-thirds, one-fifth of either house, 500,000 voters or five regional councils can force a confirmatory referendum, with no turnout quorum. Five have been held. Voters approved the 2001 reform that handed the regions wide legislative powers, with 64% in favour, and the 2020 cut in the number of parliamentarians. They rejected Berlusconi’s devolution plan in 2006, Matteo Renzi’s plan to shrink the Senate in 2016, and, on 22 and 23 March 2026, the Nordio reform that would have split the careers of judges and prosecutors and divided the High Council of the Judiciary.
The pattern is telling: Italians have accepted narrow, specific changes and turned down the broad redesigns of how power is divided. The 1948 framework, born in the same spring as the Republic itself, still governs a country whose capital is examined in our profile of Rome, the capital of Italy.