Euroscepticism has been the subject of historical research for some time. Interest in the topic has arisen from the knowledge that opposition to European integration has a temporal dimension which has shaped its content. On this basis, this essay goes to the historical roots of Italian Euroscepticism. The fact that these roots are identified in the quality of Europeism in this country is only apparently a paradox. In Italy there exists a longstanding vision of European integration (understood as a community of destiny) which is both redemptive (implicit in the concept of “external constraint”) and teleological. The gap between this political-cultural representation and the current crisis of the EU should be borne in mind when analysing the origins and fortunes of Italian Euroscepticism. At the same time, the anti-German stereotypes feeding Euroscepticism have antecedents which go back a long way and which this essay reconstructs and contextualizes.
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