1 - Structure, main themes and data of the monetary history

Summary

This study deals with the monetary history of Italy from 1861 to 1991, a span of 131 years. An earlier version of the History was published in 1991 in Italian by Mondadori. This version differs from the Italian version in two respects: it is temporally longer in that we treat the 1980s, whereas the Italian version stops in 1980; and it is more compact, having eliminated many historical details that we judged to be of lesser interest to an Englishspeaking audience.

Several reasons inspired us to write this History. First, traditionally the economic history of Italy is ‘told’ without reference to a specific interpretative framework. When a framework is used, the preference is for microeconomics rather than macroeconomics. That is, Italian economic history emphasises ‘real’ aspects in preference to nominal and monetary aspects, which are the proper domain of macroeconomics. Hence, we felt that this book would fill a vacuum. We did not want to fill this vacuum by going to the opposite extreme of interpreting the Italian monetary history through the looking glass of a single model. While our interpretation is monetarist on balance, we are not wedded to a single model. Our purpose is to interpret monetary history with reference to alternative economic models.

The second reason involves the quality of the monetary debate and the state of monetary policy in Italy. After the ‘high’ point of the 1950s, the following years were marked by deterioration both in debate and policy. From a theoretical viewpoint, the concept of money lost its importance and was substituted by the fuzzier concept of domestic credit.