A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlives of Fascist-Era Art and Architecture edited by Carmen Belmonte, Milan, Silvana, 2023, 232 pp., €48 (hardback), ISBN 9788836654482

The volume stems from the 2019 conference of the same name organised by Belmonte in Rome and retains the event's original international and multidisciplinary flavour: the 15 contributors work in seven different countries and range across anthropology, architectural history, art history, history and literature.Belmonte provides a useful introduction to the complex and evolving interconnections between history, heritage (and heritage practices), art, architecture, politics and memory, which over time have given rise to what she describes as the 'various approaches and diverging paradigms of reception [that] currently exist in Italy' (p.15).These are explored in different ways and from different perspectives in the following trio of essays, penned by three leading authorities on difficult Fascist heritage: Mia Fuller, Giuliana Pieri and Hannah Malone.For Fuller, the author of several excellent studies of postwar civic identity and memory in the Fascist new towns in the Pontine Marshes, the uncontested presence of so many Fascist-era relics in Italy points to a widespread 'inertia memoriae'.Most of the time, she notes, Italians will ignore the inherent and often explicit 'Fascistness' of such relics; only when faced with external criticism -Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2017 New Yorker op-ed 'Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?' being the most obvious examplewill they engage, and then almost always defensively.Why?Because this helps keep the peace in a country lacking a clear, settled and uncontested memory of the Fascist ventennio and the Second World War.While Fuller prefers to explain rather than judge the Italian case, Pieri is more critical of what she sees as the persistent 'state of crisis of memory' (p.35) in Italian art historiography since 1945 over the deep links between the visual arts and Fascism in the interwar era.Pieri argues that by