LAUSR

This special issue examines the ‘difficult heritage’ of Fascism in postwar and contemporary Italy. Borrowing from Sharon Macdonald (2009), we use the term (the twin of ‘undesirable heritage’ [Macdonald 2006]) to refer to a historically significant past that remains materially visible through sites, buildings, artworks, monuments and other artefacts, but which is difficult to reconcile with ‘a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity’ (Macdonald 2009, 1). Difficult heritage is also a form of ‘dissonant heritage’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) in that, as ‘history that hurts’, it inevitably involves ‘a contrast of meaning and value systems between past and present’ (Nauret 2017, 16). Our preference for ‘difficult’ over ‘dissonant’ heritage lies in its specificity – all difficult heritage is ‘dissonant’ but not all dissonant heritage is ‘difficult’ – and in its broader relevance.While dissonant heritage focuses on disputes over how the past is presented and commodified for public consumption (for example, in museums, exhibitions, and heritage sites), ‘difficult heritage’ is more concernedwith questions of legacy and reception: how a society deals with the physical reminders of a discredited – and often very recent – past; and how (and why) that relationship changes over time. As we have argued in the case of Italy – and as events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 vividly and tragically demonstrated – how a society deals with its difficult heritage can tell us a great deal about how that society has internalised, understood, or attempted to ‘come to terms’ with the past that heritage represents (Carter and Martin 2017, 340). Historians of Fascism and memory in Italy, however, have been surprisingly slow to examine how and why Italians have ignored, confronted or negotiated the country’s difficult Fascist heritage, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the material remains of Fascism are to be found virtually everywhere in Italy: their very ubiquitousness has seemingly rendered them almost invisible to the historian’s eye. This has begun to change in the last few years – a historiographical shift that the contributors to this special issue have all played their part in – but there is still much work to be done: for example, there is as yet no Italian equivalent to Gavriel Rosenfeld’s ground-breaking study of the