A Cultural History of Italy in the 2000s

This book investigates the cultural history of Italy through the foundational decade of the 2000s, treating those ten years not merely as an arbitrary calendar division, but as a distinct, transformative historical arc. The 2000s in Italy represent a long, dense decade-a period bounded at one end by the symbolic spectacle of the Catholic Church's Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 and the rollout of the Euro currency, and at the other by the crushing weight of the 2008 global financial crisis and the eventual collapse of the Berlusconi political paradigm in 2011. It was a decade in which the promises of late-modern technological progress, borderless European integration, and consumer prosperity clashed head-on with deep-seated economic stagnation, political polarization, social precarity, and an existential crisis over what it meant to be Italian in an increasingly multicultural and digitized era.