Yesterday 30 years ago saw the beginning of Tangentopoli. On February 17, 1992, Italian judge Antonio Di Pietro had Mario Chiesa, a member of the centre-left Italian Socialist Party, arrested for accepting a bribe from a Milan cleaning firm. This led to mani pulite, a nationwide investigation into the extensive problem of political corruption in Italy. Mani pulite brought to an end the First Republic in Italy. The Second Republic was characterised by the appointment of Silvio Berlusconi, a business tycoon, as prime minister in 1994. The failure to mark certain historical anniversaries risks deleting essential lessons from the collective memory. Tangentopoli is one such anniversary that Europe, and we in Malta, would do well to dwell on. Today, political analysts ask whether 30 years from the mani pulite investigations, Italian and indeed European politics have been cleaned of the worst forms of corruption. Transparency International publishes a Corruption Perception Index that ranks countries worldwide based on how corrupt their public sectors are perceived to be. The results are given on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. The 2020 index...