The post-Fascist transition is arguably the most controversial period in modern Italian history and culture. My book project is the first to focus on the intellectual fluidity of the 1943–48 early postwar era, illustrating how prewar world views were not completely discredited and new ideological oppositions were not clearly defined. Against Redemption restores the transition’s full picture, in which the cultural and the literary were key battlefields for political hegemony. I contend that dissenting voices such as Moravia, Brancati, Morante, Carlo Levi, and Malaparte contested the narratives of national redemption promoted by Communist and Christian Democrats by disputing the commonplace of Italy’s moral rebirth after Fascism. In Rome I plan to revise my manuscript and write a new chapter, titled “Ghosts of a Recent Past: Rome after the Liberation,” which retraces the capital’s extraordinary intellectual atmosphere following the August 1944 liberation.