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The source we used in this work for the benchmark years from 1913 to 1983 is Notizie statistiche sulle principali società italiane per azioni, edited by the Associazione fra le Società Italiane per Azioni (Assonime). The Imita.db database is an electronic version of this source. This dataset contains information on companies, boards of directors, and balance sheets of a large sample of Italian joint-stock companies for several benchmark years. On the whole, the dataset contains data on more than 38,000 companies, almost 300,000 directors, and more than 100,000 balance sheets. Representativeness, in terms of capital, is very high as the sample covers well over 90 percent of the total universe in all but the first two benchmark years (1911 and 1913) and the last one (1983), for which the proportion is around 85 percent. For the benchmark year 2001 we selected the top 250 companies from Le principali società italiane, the annual report on Italian joint-stock companies edited by R&S-Mediobanca. As this source does not report the names of the board members, we extracted them from Infocamere, a large dataset of Unioncamere, the association of the Italian chambers of commerce. This paper focuses on seven benchmark years: 1913, 1927, 1936, 1960, 1972, 1983, and 2001. In compliance with the White Paper rules, for each benchmark year we have selected the top 250 companies by total assets, with the exclusion of subsidiaries. The top 250 companies have been selected according to the following repartition: 50 financials and 200 non financials. As for the directors, we used only data for members of a board of directors in the strict sense, leaving out the members of Collegi sindacali. We have carefully standardized the names of the directors to make them as homogeneous as possible. However, we estimate that the information on boards of directors contained in Imita.db has a margin of error of about one percent, as is the case with other similar databases (Mintz and Schwartz 1985). These errors are mainly due to cases of homonymy, misprints, or shortcomings in the source. Data on board members of the top 250 Italian joint-stock companies for the year 1991 are not available so we had to drop this benchmark.

The paper explores the structure of the Italian corporate network by focusing on the relationships between financial - banks, insurances and holdings - and industrial firms in Italy during the period 1952-83 through the analysis of the interlocks that existed between them. By an interlock is meant the link created between two firms when an induvidual belongs to the board of directors of both. The analysis is based on a database - Imita.db - containing data on over 130,000 directors of Italian joint stock companies for the years 1952, 1960, 1972 and 1983. After showing a descriptive statistics of the companies and the directors included in the database, the paper develops a network connectivity analysis of the system. This is integrated by a prosopographic study about the big linkers, defined as those directors cumulating the highest number of offices in each benchmark year. The paper confirms that the Italian corporate network maintained substantial peculiarities in the period investigated. In particular, it argues that interlocks played an important role in guaranteeing the stability of the positions of control of the major private companies and their connections with State-owned enterprises. In 1952 and 1960, the system, centred on the larger electrical companies, showed the highest degree of cohesion. That centre dissolved after the nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1962 and was replaced by a less strong and cohesive one, hinged on banks, insurances and the major finance companies. At the beginning of the 1980s the centre appeared to have been further reshaped with the marginalisation of state-owned enterprises.