ABSTRACT
In the two years following April 1992 all the parties of government in Italy were swept away in the course of judicial investigations which revealed centrally organised systems of illegal financing of political parties and corrupt agreements between politicians and businessmen. Some of these parties, founded as long as 100 years before, had played notable parts in the construction of the Italian Republic; but since World War II they had formed an apparently immovable bloc, which kept the opposition parties, and especially the Communists, from any hope of taking power. The judges’ campaign to remoralise Italian public life came to be known as mani pulite (clean hands), a codename given by the policemen involved in the earliest investigations. Because these investigations radiated out from cases of corruption uncovered in Milan, where the ‘pool’ of most active judges was based, the whole process also came to be known by the collective term Tangentopoli (Kickback City).
