Situated at the confluence of history media and cultural studies this book reconstructs the
often deeply discordant and highly selective memories of the Holocaust in Italy in the postwar
era. The author's core method is one of reception analysis centred on the public responses to
the many films and television programmes that have addressed the Holocaust from the 1940s to
the present day. Tied to the heritage of Fascism antifascism and the Resistance public
memory of the Holocaust in Italy has changed greatly over the years. Self-acquitting myths of
Italian innocence and victimhood and universalising interpretations grounded in Catholicism
and Communism provided the initial frameworks for understanding the Holocaust. However the
last two decades have seen an increasing centrality of the Holocaust in memory culture but have
also witnessed the establishment of a paradigm that relativises other fascist crimes and levels
the differences between Fascism and antifascism. Working with the largest corpus yet
established of Holocaust film and television in Italy from the 1948 retelling of the Wandering
Jew myth to Roberto Benigni's controversial Life Is Beautiful from the American miniseries
Holocaust to Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man Conflicts of Memory probes Italy's ongoing
if incomplete process of coming to terms with this important aspect of its past.
