gostino Depretis in the 1880s, transformismo quickly became equated with any ethically questionable, self-interested actions taken by public officials purely for the sake of staying in office and maintaining power. This often manifested itself in the creation of a smoke screen of reformatory rhetoric intended to satisfy the electorate, without a subsequent introduction of any real reforms. The colonialist manner in which Piedmont annexed the other regions to create a united Italy during the Risorgimento and the divisions inherent in the new kingdom resulted in a "historical compromise" that made any deliberate social change very difficult. Consequently, Italian leaders of the destra storica and sinistra storica (the first two eras of Italian political history) shifted their focus from meaningful governance to the practice of transformismo, permanently shaping the face of Italian political life. The prevailing motto of this practice was captured perfectly in a line from Luchino Visconti's 1963 film, The Leopard: "Things must change in order to stay the same."
             Attendismo, the other type of quasi-action, was a tendency of the leftist Italian parties to passively wait for change to occur from the outside, without taking any substantial revolutionary action on their own. The Socialist Party's slogan "No support, but no sabotage" used during World War I in reference to the government's actions, was symptomatic of the party's hope for the proletariat to gain class-consciousness and rebel on its own, as foretold by Karl Marx (Absalom 1995: 93). This philosophy was passed on to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which became one of the dominant political forces after World War II. When the Resistance demonstrated that Italians were actually capable of collective action, the PCI had a tremendous chance of leading a popular movement for social reform. However, despite the temporary solidarity of Italians and the possibility of a new beginning ...