DAVIDE CADEDDU

Adriano Olivetti, Luigi Einaudi e l'ordine politico delle comunità

N. 204

Summary - After expatriating to Switzerland in February 1944, Adriano Olivetti mainly worked on a project of constitutional reform that he would have liked to propose after the war as the basis for a discussion of the main guidelines of the future Italian constitution. Th provisional versions of the text were submitted for review to several expatriates, and the dialogue with Luigi Einaudi, fostered by an interesting exchange with Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli, appears to have been particularly fruitful. As a foundation for his project of reform of the "Statuto Albertino" (King Carlo Alberto's Statute), Adriano Olivetti proposes to create a new territorial entity coinciding with traditional units such as the dioceses or the electoral college, and representing a well-defined economic, geographic and historical nucleus often centered on a town with its own market, high school, and a road, industrial or agricultural node. This local body would form the Province and a cell at the basis of the regional States, which in turn would form the Italian federal State. The idea of uniting the local administration with the electoral college electing its own political representative with the uninominal system was accepted even by Luigi Einaudi, who - upon his return to Italy - supported this principle within the Constitutional Committee, although his proposal was overlooked.