This essay deals with the long crisis of the Italian parliamentary system and posits that it may undermine representative democracy itself. The study presents an analysis of the events that marked the first two years of the XVIII Italian legislature in order to identify four ways in which parliament itself may be undermined. All of them took place during the last quarter of a century: the attack on the representativeness of the Chambers as well as parliamentarians; the debasement of confidence procedures and the lack of accountability of the Government towards Parliament; the reduction and marginalization of public debate within Parliament; the displacement of the legislative function of the Chambers in favor of the Government. These phenom...