When observed in comparative perspective, until the early-1990s the Italian welfare state was clearly an outlier, characterized by an unbalanced allocation of resources among welfare sectors (so-called functional distortion) and towards social groups (distributive distortion). Since then, however, profound transformations have affected both the institutional architecture and the distributive profile of the Italian welfare state. Through an in-depth reconstruction of three decades of welfare reforms in Italy, this article shows how retrenchment and regulatory reforms in pension and labour market policies in an earlier phase (1992–2015), combined with the rather unexpected ‘expansionary turn’ in family and anti-poverty policies in more recent times (2016–2022), have partly reduced the comparative imbalances of the Italian welfare state, making it less of an outlier than in previous decades. To understand such puzzling developments, it relies on an explanatory framework centred on the interplay between socio-political demand and political supply, showing how the emergence of new coalitions, which for the first time mobilized latent social needs, combined with the reshuffling of the party system and the electoral success of parties challenging the austerity paradigm, quite unexpectedly contributed to make the Italian welfare state now look more ‘mainstream’ than in the past.