Mussolini's bold claims upon the monuments and rhetoric of ancient Rome have been the subject of a number of recent books. D. Medina Lasansky shows us a much less familiar side of the cultural politics of Italian Fascism, tracing its wide-ranging efforts to adapt the nation's medieval and Renaissance heritage to satisfy the regime's programs of national regeneration. Anyone acquainted with the beauties of Tuscany will be surprised to learn that architects, planners, and administrators working within Fascist programs fabricated much of what today's tourists admire as authentic. Public...

Beginning in the 1730s, Heather Minor tells us, Rome "began to resemble one huge construction site," with a series of ambitious and expensive new building campaigns that transformed the face and substance of the city. From renovations of the Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano and the restoration of the Arch of Constantine to the creation of the Capitoline Museum and the establishment of the papacy's Calcografia, the push for reform not only renewed papal and Church identity but also revived Italian culture as a whole. Based on extensive archival research and full of...

In the west coast port city of Gothenburg, Sweden, the architect Gunnar Asplund built a modest extension to an old courthouse on the main square (1934-36). Judged today to be one of the finest works of modern architecture, the courthouse extension was immediately the object of a negative newspaper campaign led by one of the most noted editors of the day, Torgny Segerstedt. Famous for his determined opposition to National Socialism, he also took a principled stand against the undermining of urban tradition in Gothenburg. Gothenburg's problems with modern public architecture, though...