Italy, officially the Italian Worker's Republic, is a marxist-leninist state located in Southern Europe, bordered by France, Yugoslavia, Austria-Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Two Sicilies. It is a regional power and a former member of the Warsaw Pact.
After winning the 1948 Italian general elections, Italy was plagued with the secession of two rogue states: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Republic of Sardinia. This led to a hardline stance by Italian leader Palmiro Togliatti, who maintained a very good relationship with the Soviet Union in the early years of the RLI. Togliatti refused to recognize either of the two break-away states, and the Two Sicilies remains "officially" unrecognized by Italy to this day.
Though Togliatti was a devout Stalinist, the Italians didn't take too kindly to being a Soviet puppet. Togliatti broke away from the Eastern Bloc and began a Italo-Greco-Yugoslav-Albanian axis known as the "Third Way Bloc".