From the breakup of the anti-fascist alliance, through centrism and the center-left alliance, to the (politically fraught and only partially realized) "national solidarity" between the DC and PCI in the 1970s, the politics of the Italian Republic largely reflected international Cold War bipolarism. This volume uses previously unpublished documentation to furnish an extraordinary picture of events, showing how two dimensions - the risks of civil war on the one hand and a tormented constitutional coexistence on the other - went hand in hand, detailing the influence and the limits of the actions of the superpowers on the country, not to mention the internal uses made of the conflict by national actors.