Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy, by Joshua Arthurs. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press 2012, xvi, 216 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). Is there anything left to say about Fascist Italy's connections to the country's Roman past? Surprisingly enough, there is, and Joshua Arthurs's new book illustrates how non-party institutions configured the image of that past institutionally, outside of the party and regime propaganda machines. Though later historians and observers belittled the extravagant displays of romanita, from representations of she-wolves to the construction of temporary triumphal arches, Arthurs argues that, far from consisting simply of rhetorical displays, the cult of romanita was central to Fascist Party objectives as a revolutionary series of reference points through which to achieve a particular Italian version of modernity. From political organization to core values promoted by the regime, the bonds with the peninsula's millenial memories of empire were meant to transform not only individuals and the country, but also the city of Rome itself. Italy's image and relevance in the international sphere, long the subject of snide jokes, would also be reframed through the fulfillment of a fleshed out association with ancient Rome. To accomplish these goals, the regime could count on the support and energies of affiliated institutions such as the Istituto di Studi Romani and later, the Mostra Augustea della Romanita. Unlike many contemporary historians, Arthurs's singular contribution is to take the regime's intellectual objectives seriously, which leads him to produce a richer and more provocative analysis of Fascism's Roman connections than earlier studies. Appeals to ancient Rome as a mobilizing force for achieving Italian unity can be traced back to the fourteenth century and the writings and travels of the poet Petrarch, and certainly Renaissance princes and humanists collapsed the intervening centuries between ancient Rome and their own era to forge a direct link with that noble past. Partisans of Italian unity in the early nineteenth century simply followed a long standing, if inconsistent, tradition of undergirding contemporary glories with those of antiquity. Setting out from the Risorgimento rather than from the years immediately preceding Mussolini's seizure of power, Arthurs illustrates how the notion of romanita galvanized young, bourgeois patriots bent on wresting power away from foreign and clerical control in a pattern the Fascists enhanced without altering significantly. Other scholars have also studied these links, but Arthurs makes a significant contribution to scholarship with his analysis not of Partito Nazionale Fascist (PNF) institutions, but independent ones, such as the founding and operation of the Istituto di Studi Romani from 1925, the scholarly body directly responsible for giving momentum and academic credibility to the enterprise. The journal Roma--started less than a month after the 1922 March on Rome by the same group that later founded the Istituto--aimed to speak to a non-scholarly audience about Roman antiquity. …