On the threshold of the new millennium, as Italy prepares to play an ever more active part in the European Union, it is not inappropriate that students of Italian culture should ask: 'What is contemporary Italian national identity, and what will the adjective “Italian” mean in the future?' The essays in this volume have primarily looked back over cultural developments in post-unification Italy from the perspective of late twentieth-century contemporaneity. They have also occasionally sought to make conjectures about possible future developments. In this brief epilogue, my focus will be on the present and the future, a prospective stance reflective of some of the collection's general aims, and conditioned of course by current realities. The question of what 'Italian' now signifies, and what the adjective may well encompass in future years implicitly or explicitly informs all that follows.

Italy was belatedly born as a nation under the sign of a constructed political and linguistic unity. Unification has always been more a dream than a reality, however, in spite of the many efforts over the last century to bring about national unity. Historically, Italian society and culture have been fragmented, and today there is an increasing, and new, fragmentation under pressure from both internal and external forces. Among these forces are greatly increased immigration, mainly from socalled developing countries, the revival of regionalism and widespread Americanization.