The debate over Federalism is old like the stars in Italy, a neverending story... Italy has a long history of regionalism since the Augustean principate, because the Roman regional system essentially survived - with the opportune modifications with the times, but the only really changing one being the creation of Lombardia as the region of the Lombards and this was permeated by the local communal realities in the Middle Ages and stabilizing in Modern Time.
But effectively this stabilization consolidated the various regional identities to the point those are considered as complementation of Italian identity today. I am Italian because I am Tuscan and he is Italian because he is Lombard and she is Italian because she is Sicilian...
This mindset was valid in 1861 as for today in the country, and still it works. It's a limit but also a strenght of ours.
The issue is however the country never found a balance between centralism and regionalism since 1861. After WWI this could have been more possible but the dictatorship pushed to the extreme centralism, which consequently with the return of democracy there was a general opinion to enforce regional decentralization.
But there were other issues. By peace conditions, Italy was forced to concede autonomy to five regions, but didn't concede the same to the other fifteen, and occurred three decades so the regions could elect their councils. But there always was some lingering resentment from the ordinary statute regions towards the five autonomous ones, because the three northern ones prospered more than the others and the two southern ones instead turned to be (especially Sicily) a social and economic burden.
For this, the richest regions of the North (Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont and Emilia Romagna) asked recently for expanded powers accordingly to the constitution. But every region had their own ideas (the Lombards just wanted to retain more local revenues, the Venetians wanted - or at least the current government - essentially the status of autonomy, and this is barred by the constitution, and besides the other regions won't surely support it)... in short is quite complex.