The volume includes an introduction by the editors as well as fifteen essays (one of which by Di Michele himself) assembled under six sections: »Fascism and Nazism in a transnational key«; »Volksgemeinschaft and the relationship between Italian society and Fascism«; »Hitler and Mussolini«; »Violence«; »Stone Fascism [i.e. Fascist architecture] after the war« and »The New Right and Fascism«, this last section being particularly topical after the victory of the coalition led by post-Fascist party Fratelli d’Italia at Italy’s recent general elections.

Partly made up of the proceedings of a conference held in 2018 at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, the book offers updated and effective overviews of the studies on the two major Fascist dictatorships, with relevant, thoughtful comments, covering a time span that goes from the post-First World War period to the present years.

The most original contribution is perhaps the one by Roberta Pergher, that focuses on Italian Fascism in transnational historiography. Her judgement is somewhat pessimistic, as she argues that the »new interest in transfers has not fundamentally changed our understanding of fascism [as an international phenomenon]« and that, actually, it had even »slightly distorted our picture, foregrounding ideological coherence and cultural exchange while the non-ideological elements [...] have taken more of a back seat« (p. 44–45). Equally interesting are Pergher’s concluding remarks on the use of the »fascist label« for »events or groups in the present«. If, on the one hand, she finds more than reasonable to be »parsimonious in our use of the term«, on the other hand she convincingly claims that »to require, for example, that movements or situations cross the threshold of war and genocide before we use the label [fascism] would be to demand a rigid standard that no fascist movement in the past met at every stage of its existence« (p. 57–58).

In the same section, Arnd Bauerkämper, despite the title of his essay hinting at the transnational context of German historiography on Nazism, reflects above all on traditional interpretations of Nazism, noting that »historiography of National Socialism has largely reflected trends in historiography rather than promoted them« (p. 14) and that »in the early 1990s research on fascism [as an international phenomenon] appeared to be out of touch with mainstream historiography and in shambles« (p. 26). However, in more recent years, according to Bauerkämper, Italian and German historians have opposed through innovative research those »efforts [...] to overstate differences between Italian Fascism and Nazism« that he attributes to scholars such as Denis Mack Smith and Renzo De Felice (p. 27). These new studies »accentuated basic similarities« between the two regimes, for instance with regard to »expansionism, racism, and mass atrocities«, at the same time confirming »basic differences« such as »the mass murder of Jews and other minorities« in the case of Nazism (p. 28).

Paul Corner, who in his essay focuses on an aspect that he has been investigating deeply in recent years, i.e. the question of »consensus« in Italian Fascism, seems to share Bauerkämper’s point about a new emphasis on similarities between Fascism and Nazism¹. He maintains that exactly going »beyond consensus« can crucially contribute to »a ›repositioning‹ of Italian Fascism with respect to other totalitarian regimes« (p. 73), since viewing »any kind of ›consensus‹ for the regime« as »formed within the overall context of heavy and generalized coercion« makes Italian Fascism »look much more like the other totalitarian regimes« (p. 78).

In conclusion, the volume provides us with a useful ›companion‹ to recent literature on the two major Fascist dictatorships, and on the respective political movements, with five forays into the post-Second-World-War context, namely the essays by Paolo Nicoloso on Fascist architecture in republican Italy, by Di Michele on Fascist monuments in Bolzano, by Roger Griffin on the relevance of the concept »Fascism« in recent times, by Marzia Ponso on the German right-wing populism and by Matteo Albanese on the two Italian far-right formations Forza Nuova and CasaPound Italia.

After reading it, my overall sensation is that much research is still to be done, not only, as one could expect, in the case of Fascism (Corner notes that »there is still no comprehensive social history of the Fascist period«, p. 81) or in the comparison between the two regimes, but even in the case of Nazism itself, whose historiography seems to some observers »so multi-faceted that no individual scholar [would be able] to oversee it« (p. 13).

To pick two fields of studies which I am familiar with: with regard to Erinnerungskulturen of the two dictatorships, if it is true that studies on Italy are still very far behind those realized on Germany, comparative research on the topic started only some years ago². In addition, no broad study on emotions in Fascist Italy or in Nazi Germany has been written so far, despite the crucial role that different feelings such as fear of police repression or affection towards the Duce or the Führer seem to have played in those contexts³. In his paragraph about »Fascist Violence«, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi notes that in Italy, after the end of the First World War, »the movement, and then the Fascist Party, succeeded in giving an organization, a structure, an ideology, a purpose to thousands of ex-combatants (and many teenagers) angry [my emphasis] at the outcome of the conflict and convinced that they had been deprived of the fruits of victory« (p. 164). As the author of a forthcoming book on the political role that anger played in Italian LGBT activism in the 1970s, I would be particularly interested in getting to know more about the origins, the development, the consequences, as well as the possible subsequent transfer abroad, and transformation on the domestic level of that collective anger from the early post-war period⁴.