ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Italy’s economic development and social stratification would remain incomplete if people failed to relate it to the pyramid of social power considered both in itself, and in its associated ceti and strata. The Church’s fall from power and loss of prestige also means that Italy’s whole power structure lost much of its credibility. The time has long since passed when one could think of Marxism as offering a viable alternative value-system to the Catholic model, or as representing the spearhead of progress. Reduced to its simplest terms, with reference to the criteria of legitimacy, the socialization system and the institutional system. Religious observance throughout Italy was at a very high level at the end of the eighteenth century, with the exception of a few states in the peninsula where religion had never had much hold. In the socialization system the Church and the family are replaced by the family, the schools and the mass media.
