BOOK REVIEW I luoghi del fascismo. Memoria, politica, rimozione edited by Giulia Albanese and Lucia Ceci, Rome, Viella, 2022, 353 pp., €32.00 (paperback), ISBN 979-12-5469-190-8 Giulia Beatrice Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute for Art History/University of Zürich Email: giulia.beatrice@biblhertz.it (Received 7 September 2023; accepted 8 September 2023) I luoghi del fascismo. Memoria, politica, rimozione aims to bring together the numerous mater- ial testimonies of Fascism that are scattered across Italy, reconstructing their history and the debate around them since the end of the regime, and then investigating their contem- porary value. The editors, Giulia Albanese and Lucia Ceci, pose as principal questions what use has been made of these places in republican Italy, and what memory of the relation- ship with Fascism the country retains today. The volume originates from a project carried out by the Ferruccio Parri National Institute since 2018, which seeks to map all the places in Italy that are the object of more or less conscious commemoration of Fascism and to collect information on their toponymy, symbols, and monuments. Thanks to significant media coverage, the Institute’s project, whose constantly updated results can be consulted on a website (www.luoghidelfascismo.it), has managed to relocate the Fascist heritage issue from academic to public debate, a goal repeatedly invoked in the volume. The book collects 16 essays by archaeologists, historians and art and architecture his- torians that deal with emblematic case studies. The first part, I luoghi della memoria, reviews more generally the present situation in Italy: its internal lack of homogeneity, the stylistic architectural pluralism of Fascism, the progressive depoliticisation of places, the different types of places and memory to contend with. From these essays, the perspec- tive of conservation in Italian public opinion – contested and problematised by all the authors – appears prevalent. The Italian obsession with heritage and preservation does not consider any other possibility than to erase or protect, even restore (as in the case of Mario Sironi’s unveiled fresco mentioned by Carmen Belmonte, p. 88). Italy seems to have a long-term memory as far as conservation is concerned, but a short-term memory with regards to the Fascist ventennio. The Arch of Victory in Bolzano, where the monu- ment has been refurbished and reopened with a display itinerary in multiple languages that promotes understanding and contextualisation, stands out as the only virtuous example of a ‘democratic reappropriation of the monumental memory of Fascism’ and an ‘all-round recontextualisation of the monument’ (p. 53). In the second section, Centri e periferie della memoria, nine distinctive contexts are ana- lysed to address different geographical and chronological memory-related scenarios. Rome stands out, with its imperial monuments and the project of the Fori, which is © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy Modern Italy (2023), 1–2 doi:10.1017/mit.2023.55 https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.55 Published online by Cambridge University Press