ABSTRACT
With the deepening of European integration, the European Union has come to exert increasingly significant direct and indirect effects on the member states, reinforcing a well-established trend whose origins date back to the very creation of the European Economic Community in 1957. The domestic impact of the EU is particularly important with reference to Italy, a country for which integration in Europe has represented a symbolic point of reference and a widely used external lever for domestic institutional and policy changes. This process intensified during the run-up to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which required major domestic adjustments in Italy in order to meet the convergence criteria (Della Sala 1997; Sbragia 2001; Radaelli 2002; Quaglia 2004a).
