Joseph LaPalombara was not merely one of the greatest American political scientists of the twentieth century. For anyone who truly sought to understand the relationship between the United States and Italy, he was a living bridge between two worlds: the America where he was born and raised, and the Italy of his grandparents, a country he studied, loved, criticized, and explained with rare intellectual freedom.
The son of Italian immigrants from Abruzzo, raised in Chicago’s Little Italy, LaPalombara rose to the highest levels of American academia without ever losing his practical understanding of life and real politics. A professor at Yale for more than half a century, he became the foremost American scholar of Italian politics.
