Bringing together scholars from the Italian and English-speaking worlds, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Ranging in their study from patriotic monuments to sado-masochistic films, the essays here collected ask how and why and when Mussolini's dictatorship mattered after the event, and so provide a fascinating study of the relationship between a traumatic past and the changing present and future.

What was Italian fascism? Was it the ideology and experience of the trenches brought to political authority? Or did it express the hopes and ideals of an emerging middle class which had done well out of World War I? To what extent was fascism a boys' ideology? And to what degree did Mussolini lead - and to what extent follow - public opinion?

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima explores the way in which the main combatant societies of the Second World War have historicized that experience. Since 1945, debates in Germany about the past that would not fade away have been reasonably well-known. But in this book, Richard Bosworth maintains that Germany is not unique. He argues that in Britain, France, Italy, the USSR and Japan, as well as in Germany, the traumatic history of the long Second World War has remained crucial to the culture and the politics of post-war societies. Each has felt a compelling need to interpret this past event...

'It would be difficult to imagine a more wittier or stimulating text.' Paul Preston, LSE. Bosworth challenges many aspects of current Italian histor- iography and offers an original and lively vision of the place of Italy in modern history.

In the heart of Rome beside the Capitol, confronting the Piazza Venezia, stands the Victor Emmanuel monument. In Rome, which until 1945 was so often accorded the adjectives 'eternal' or 'imperial', the monumentissimo (as sardonic socialists labelled it) is the most public, most theatrical and most excessive architectural celebration of post-Risorgimento Italian patriotism, nationalism and perhaps imperialism. This book asks why the Victor Emmanuel monument, planned after 1878 and opened in 1911, was a structure raised by Liberal and not Fascist Italy. Through a detailed study of diplomacy, of...

In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice--not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle epoque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the "Disneylandification" of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major...