In Italy ‘middle class’ means the intellectual and professional strata

Evidence

In Italy, where the feudal aristocracy was destroyed by the mediaeval Communes (physically destroyed in the civil wars, except in Southern Italy and Sicily), since the traditional ‘high’ class is missing, the term ‘middle’ has gone down a rung. ‘Negatively,’ middle class means non-popular, i.e. those not workers or peasants; positively, it means the intellectual strata, the professional strata, the public employees. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2251

Categorization

• DEFINE: A concrete demonstration of how class terminology is nationally contingent — the same label indexes different social groups in England, France, and Italy.
• XREF: Useful counterpoint to how the category of the middle class functions in contemporary culturalist explanations of Islamophobia.