This edited volume is the first book to comprehensively explore the complex structures and history of Italian police institutions and police professional knowledge since 1946, spanning from the end of WWII and the fall of fascism through the watershed 2001 conflicts in Genoa and up to the present.

History, sociology, and criminology are all deployed to examine how the Italian State Police build the categories and the conceptual tools through which they are able to give sense to the world, and to frame the social groups with which they interact. As empirical access to Italian police institutions is frequently hindered by secrecy, formal restrictions, and limited archives, the authors use a "mirror-based" methodology grounded in sources such as manuals and guidelines, professional journals, speeches and ceremonies, press and media materials, and police fiction. Together, these reveal a story of (incomplete) democratization and demilitarization, changing approaches to public order and social control, and transformations in gender and class belongings both inside and outside of police institutions in a country where police transparency has not always been the norm.

This book will be a necessary reference for scholars of police studies and of Italy, including historians, sociologists, criminologists, and cultural scholars.