Abstract: One of the outstanding paradoxes in Italian public life is the contrast between the heavy web of laws that hangs over everyday life and the contempt that the person in the street generally exhibits toward all legal regulations. Cynics maintain that violating the law is one of the requisites in the art of survival in Italy and that the country indeed functions only because laws of greater or lesser importance are ignored. In any case the dichotomy between the paese legale and the paese reale, between the “legal Italy” and the “real Italy,” is a fundamental one. The country's legal tradition extends far back into the past and is still cultivated in the universities. But the everyday world of legal reality is all too often one of malfunctioning courts, a politicized judiciary, arbitrary judges, and inadequately protected civil liberties. Hence the taunt that Italy is the cradle of law but the grave of justice.