An idea of Italy

On the face of it, contemporary Italian intellectuals have a more prestigious existence than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Whether as writers, academics, journalists or film-directors, Italian intellectuals are courted by political parties of all persuasions to add lustre to their slates at election time, and wooed by the media as influential opinion makers. The contact Italian intellectuals have with the institutions of civil society comes from a long tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, Italian society has consistently relied on its intellectuals, rather than its political class, to supply the nation's agents for social change. When Dante, for example, in his De vulgari eloquentia examined the panoply of local dialects to find one on which to base a supraregional language for the peninsula, he turned to the literary idiom of his fellow poets, which seemed to him the only noble and unifying element present in an Italy rife with factionalism.