Abstract

Against the background of the processes of nation building and modernization, and their institutional innovations, the authors outline a pedagogical pattern of the tasks assigned to the Carabinieri Corps marked with the "common interest" protection and tied into the representative social control function, both informing and investigative. They act as socializing agents of new values and Italian language that have been carried by Unification and bring to bear a cultural mediation with respect to the noticeable socio-cultural backwardness of Central and Southern Italy in the mid nineteenth century. Despite a centuries-old and embedded italic character previously developed in lack of a political body this people struggles with the "sense of the State" uphold by modernization making use of local traditions as a resistance devices.