This book is one of the most recent contributions to the OUP series Classical Presences, edited by L. Hardwick and J.I. Porter. After studies such as P. Vasunia's The Classics and Colonial India (2013), M. Bizer's Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (2011) and Y. Hamilakis's The Nation and its Ruins (2009) – all exploring in their own specific ways how claims to the classical past were made, sustained and exploited throughout history – the topic of d.F.'s book may come as a surprise. The author convincingly argues that anti-romanism, favouring Italic antiquity over ancient Rome, was a driving force in the Italian nation-building process. Seven chapters discuss, chronologically, the uses of Italic antiquity in various fields of Italian scholarship from the Napoleonic period to the demise of Fascism (1796–1943).

As d.F. explains in the introduction, the book emerged from ‘a profound dissatisfaction and disagreement with the growing tendency … to streamline Italian history in the name of a continuity that in fact never existed’ (p. 14). D.F. rejects the notion that Italian nationalism sprang from one single idea or was based on ‘clearly defined and limited cultural references’ (p. 14). With good reason, therefore, he speaks of a plurality of nationalisms. He moreover confines his analyses to one well-defined aspect of Italian nation-building that both helps to understand its cultural workings and illustrates its complexity. D.F. zooms in on the notion of the autochthony of the Italian people, which he defines as ‘the myth of its perpetual presence in the country that by attesting its antiquity supposedly also substantiates its cultural primacy’ (p. 17). This topic has curiously fallen through the cracks of modern scholarship on Italian nationalism, which stresses the importance of the free communes of the medioevo or the myth of a Third Rome. D.F. demonstrates, however, that even during the obsessive celebration of ancient Rome under Fascism, the myth of pre-Roman antiquity did anything but fade away.

The first chapter, ‘The Historic Past of the Nation’, discusses the theory of Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823). Cuoco argued that the Etruscans were the primogenitors of the Italians and that they had transmitted their civilisation from Italy to the rest of the Mediterranean. Placing Cuoco's theory in its cultural and political contexts, d.F. argues that it not only created an ancient ethnic and cultural unity for the Italians, but also asserted their cultural primacy in the face of French claims to dominance. Although Cuoco's theory was very influential, it was rejected by Giuseppe Micali (1769–1844), whose ideas are the main topic of the second chapter ‘A Plural Italy’. Micali argued that, in ancient times, the peninsula had been inhabited by different peoples who eventually adopted the cultural model of Rome. He thus denied Cuoco's idea of shared ethnic origins and replaced it by the notion of a common cultural framework. In the third chapter, ‘Unity in Diversity’, d.F. assesses Micali's impact on the political culture of the Risorgimento (1815–1870). With great sensitivity to the concerns peculiar to three regions of the peninsula, he charts how, on the eve of 1848, different aspects of Micali's theory were used in Lombardy, Sicily and Naples.

The fourth chapter, ‘The Other Italy’, deals with the demise of Micali's model. The inharmonious relations between various parts of Italy, fuelled by the vexed ‘Southern Question’, produced opposite responses, ranging from proposals in favour of centralisation (in line with the monarchy) to the model of local co-operation (popular in the republican opposition and in some regions of the South). Exploring the work of Giacomo Racioppi (1827–1908), d.F. shows how, in the latter model, the notion of a persistent ethno-cultural diversity was used in attempts to integrate the Mezzogiorno in a united Italy. How notions of ethno-cultural diversity gave rise to racial theories is the topic of the fifth chapter, ‘The Anthropology of the Nation’, which is perhaps the most provocative part of the book. D.F. discusses how the idea of ancient ethnic diversity, combined with perceptions of a hardening north–south divide, crystallised in the theory of Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936). Sergi's theory stated that, since ancient times, two distinct peoples had inhabited the peninsula: the one northern and Aryan, the other southern and Mediterranean. While Sergi has become the standard-bearer of Italian racism, d.F. criticises this image by relocating his ideas in their original context. According to him, Sergi did not use his racial theory to buttress a logic of exclusion or repression. The author demonstrates that the racist interpretation of Sergi's theories originated in the work of the sociologist Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), who blamed the alleged racial inferiority of Italy's south for ever-failing democratisation. In the last analysis, d.F. argues, racist tendencies in Italian anthropology must be traced not to the right of the political spectrum, but to the radical left and the Socialist Party itself.

The widening gap between the Italian North and South catalysed the left's criticism of the state, while it forced monarchists to reaffirm Italian uniformity. In the sixth chapter, ‘Return to Rome’, d.F. discusses how the work of Ettore Pais (1856–1939) exemplifies the renewal of Roman studies. Inspired by Mommsen's views on the unifying force of Rome, Pais insisted on the analogy between ancient Rome and modern Italy, which was welcomed by some of those who, at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the unified national state endangered. Several decades later, it would be exploited by Fascism, which Pais embraced. In the seventh and final chapter, ‘The Italian Fascist Empire, Racial Policy and Etruscology’, d.F. shows that Fascist romanità, surprisingly, never eclipsed the notion of ethnic diversity, which was made to serve the celebration of Rome's unifying potency.

The stress on the great variety of views on Italic antiquity is a particularly strong point of the book, especially its explicit rejection of teleological narratives about the nation-forming process. D.F. is very careful to avoid what he calls ‘a retrograde procedure that spends little time analysing how much, in predatory terms, later writers make of their predecessors’ work' (p. 13). This critical attitude appears best in his discussion of how Niceforo and others appropriated Sergi's theory about the African origins of the Mediterranean race to bolster their own agendas (Chapters 5 and 7). But it also appears in his perceptive interpretations of the work of individual scholars, in which d.F. acknowledges the relevant shifts in their thinking, for example in his discussions of Pais (Chapter 6) and Niceforo (Chapters 5 and 7). In his chapter on Fascism (Chapter 7), d.F. ably reveals the complex interplay between the academic community and the political arena, especially with regard to the racial laws, and one might regret that the institutional context of the individuals and theories discussed is not always taken into account as it is in this chapter.

In the ongoing debate on the origins and nature of nationalism, d.F. expressly sides with the modernists (p. 14). Although this explains why he restricts his analysis to the modern period, a few more lines here and there on how individual scholars appropriated earlier ideas and theories would have enabled d.F. to substantiate more fully his assertion that the process of nation-building was ‘based on an arsenal of myths, symbols, and memories amply provided by the Italian cultural tradition in the early modern age’ (p. 15). The tension between the book's general modernist outlook and its ethno-symbolist emphasis on long-standing cultural traditions or ‘cultural origins’ (as it is in the title) cannot be missed, yet it does not seriously detract from the central argument that anti-romanism profoundly shaped the Italian nation-building process.

The bibliography is very rich and helpful. Regrettably, there is no conclusion discussing the implications of the book's complex argument. But needless to say, this highly original and insightful book will be of great relevance to all those who, having at least some prior knowledge of the political history of modern Italy, are interested in an underexplored but crucial problem in its cultural history.