This book investigates how democratic societies confront the material and symbolic legacies of fascism. Focusing on Italy and placing it in comparative European perspective, it explores the contested histories of monuments, buildings, urban spaces, place names, and commemorative practices associated with fascist regimes.

Through a range of case studies, the volume analyses how these difficult heritage sites have been preserved, transformed, reinterpreted, or challenged from 1945 to the present. In doing so, it sheds light on broader questions of historical memory, public history, national identity, and democratic culture.

Combining insights from history, heritage studies, architecture, and memory studies, the book offers a timely contribution to current debates on the management of authoritarian pasts and the role of public memory in contemporary Europe.

Giulia Albanese is Full Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Padua, Italy. Over the years, her research interests have focused primarily on investigating the origins of Fascism, political violence, and authoritarian cultures in the interwar period, with an increasing attention to the comparative and transnational dimension of fascism and its memory. Her publications include Mediterranean Dictatorships: Fascist Subversions and Coups d'État in Italy, Spain, Portugal (2016), in Italian, and the edition in English of The March on Rome (2019). She has also recently edited, together with Filippo Focardi, Matteo Millan and Marco Mondini, The Global Impact of the March on Rome (2026) and Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism (2021).

Lucia Ceci is Full Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where she is Head of the Department of History, Humanities, and Society. She has extensively studied the relationships between Catholicism, politics, and violence in twentieth-century Europe and Latin America, as well as the Church in Africa under colonial rule. Her most recent edited volume is Fascismo. Un regime di guerra (2025), with Alessio Gagliardi, Antonella Meniconi, and Gregorio Sorgonà. Her books include The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy (Routledge, 2016), whose Italian edition won the Friuli History Award, Cattolici tra fascismo e postfascismo (2026), and Catholics and Political Violence in the Twentieth Century (2025), originally published in Italian and also translated into Spanish in 2026.