In the village of Romlino last week, unschooled Communist peasants, long forbidden to put up tendentious signs, jubilantly pasted up a wall poster that said simply: "We put this up just for the hell of it." Italy's Communists were not the only ones celebrating the explosive first verdict of Italy's spanking new Constitutional Court.
Until last week it was one of Italy's bitter national jokes that, although the constitution adopted by the fledgling Italian republic in 1947 bristles with democratic safeguards and guarantees of civil liberties, the only section of the constitution...