By all accounts the years 1901–14 were a remarkable period in Italy's recent history. It was an era of significant political and social reform, which had its counterpart in the république radicale in France, and the radical liberalism of Lloyd George and Asquith in Britain. In Italy these years are usually referred to as the “Giolittian era” because of Giovanni Giolitti's domination of parliament and politics. Giolitti and his collaborators sought to guide Italy through a set of delicate transitions, in many respects comparable to similar processes underway in all European states with liberal parliamentary institutions and traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: from a parliamentary system based on a restricted franchise to a democratic suffrage; from a repressive to an open system of labor relations; and from a “nightwatchman” state to a rudimentary social welfare state. Nowhere was this process of transition easy, and in many countries – Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Austria, in addition to Italy – in the interwar years parliamentary institutions collapsed under the stress. In Italy during the Giolittian era, however, significant steps toward democratization were taken. Salomone felicitously characterized the political system during these years as a “democracy in the making.”

In many respects, Italian politics at the beginning of the century bear greater similarities to the Western democracies than to the more authoritarian political systems of Central Europe.