Italy is falling apart, both politically and economically. Faced
with a massive debt crisis and defections from his coalition in
Parliament, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi -- the most
dominant political figure in Rome since Benito Mussolini --
tendered his resignation last week. Yet Italy's problems go
deeper than Berlusconi's poor political performance and his
notorious peccadilloes: Their roots lie in the country's fragile
sense of a national identity in whose founding myths few
Italians now believe. Italy's hasty and heavy-handed 19th-
century unification, followed in the 20th century by fascism and
defeat in World War II, left the country bereft of a sense of
nationhood. This might not have mattered if the post-fascist
state had been more successful, not just as the overseer of the
economy but as an entity with which its citizens could identify
and rely on. Yet for the last 60 years, the Italian Republic has
failed to provide functioning government, tackle corruption,
safeguard the environment, or even p