Abstract

Historiographic works dealing with Italian-French relations oscillate, particularly in their titles, between two poles: that of the emphasis on the difficulties of a friendship that has never been taken for granted and that of a fraternity of a relationships so strong as to survive the most lethal impacts or to be resurrected after the greatest challenges. If one examines the evolution of those relations, it is evident that the moments of tension exceed those of relaxation. The question about the underlying nature of such tension is legitimate. The constant ripple that characterizes the bilateral dialogue can be traced back to long-term dialectics between cooperation and rivalry between two subjects of a relationship based on a basic asymmetry, to be defended and claimed (by France) or corrected and denied (by Italy).