From a constitutional standpoint, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the first edition of this textbook was published a decade ago. After the fall of the fourth Berlusconi Government in November 2011 Italy has had five prime ministers. The fifth, the incumbent Prof.
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Giuseppe Conte, presides over a "Yellow-Green" coalition composed of the Five Star Movement and the Lega, an utter novelty for the Italian political system that has led many observers to claim that Italy has entered its "Third Republic". A recent attempt to reform the Constitution under the Renzi Administration was soundly defeated in a referendum on 4 December 2016. In the meantime, since 2008, Parliament's electoral law has been changed four times either by laws approved by Parliament or by judgments of unconstitutionality handed down by the Constitutional Court thus leaving comparative constitutionalists across the globe in no doubt that Italy has become the fatherland of "electoral engineering". One could continue for several pages with a chronicle of constitutional events that have occurred over the last ten years, but what one should be left in no doubt about is that a new edition of Introduction to Italian Public Law was long overdue. Each chapter has not only been updated, but the authors have also taken into account the precious feedback of thousands of students that have studied this book over the years.
