This book provides the first full account of the Italian Sobility in the post-unification era, and challenges recent interpretations that have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites by highlighting the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles developed more indirect forms of influence, while remaining a separate and exclusive group with limited social contacts with industrial or managerial elites, until World War I transformed their old way of life.