Upholding the rule of law and fighting corruption are essential if Italy's renewed economic growth is to flourish, president Sergio Mattarella said on Thursday.
"A new era is beginning in Italy," Mattarella told top office-bearers, lawmakers and business representatives attending a knighthood ceremony at the Quirinale palace in Rome.
"We need to enter it with greater awareness of the resources we possess and with greater public spirit," he said.
"The rule of law and the fight against corruption are essential conditions for Italy's new growth," he said.
The Italian parliament's upper house Senate speaker and anti-mafia magistrate Pietro Grasso, and the head of Italy's Constitutional Court, Alessandro Criscuolo, were among those present at the ceremony.
Mattarella's appeal came the same day that a former junior transport minister and nine others were arrested amid a graft investigation into road building tenders at Italy's highway agency.
Briefing journalists on the probe, Rome's chief prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone said corruption in Italy "seems to be seen as an acceptable everyday thing". "This is a depressing situation," he said.
Earlier this week, the trial in Rome opened of the former head of the municipal garbage collection service and four other people following a major graft probe that exposed an alleged mafia network which is accused of rigging tenders and siphoning off millions of euros.
Rome's former conservative mayor Gianni Alemanno was among dozens of politicians and businessmen implicated in the probe, which led to scores of arrests.
