Christa Salamandra's "A New Old Damascus" provides a highly instructive and fascinating reading for Middle East scholars as well as common readers interested in Syria as a topic.The fruit of more than two years of fieldwork, Salamandra's dense monograph is a masterly piece of scholarship with literary qualities, and can hence be profitably read on a double level.Through its pages the reader is exposed to an informed and convincing analysis of the way in which the production and consumption of an "old Damascus" in the media, as well as in political initiatives and in everyday social interaction, is the arena in which the multifarious Damascene élite fights its "identity wars", against the constant attempts of competing social groups.Such analysis is not only highly interesting per se, but also because it unveils social-cultural dynamics that can be virtually detected and studied anywhere else. One learns not only about the specific, Damascene "identity wars", but is also stimulated to apply the same analytical pattern to his or her environment (for instance, the definition and defence of some identity linked to a supposed "authentic past" can be said to be an ubiquitous character of many a local policies in Europe and in the "West" broadly conceived).At the same time, "A New Old Damascus" is an enthralling account of places, episodes, encounters, dialogues, brilliantly narrated - all the more precious if we consider that the world in which they are placed is undergoing radical and dramatic changes.What keeps together and characterizes both levels on which the book can be read is the author's clear, constant and balanced presence. Salamandra does not try to hide behind an impersonal reasoning or report, but continually makes her theoretical framework explicit to her reader, as well as her doubts, self-criticism, and even stalemates. For instance, an episode such as the forced participation in a beauty contest (pp. 64-70) is not only functional to the study of the social dynamics at stake in the monograph, but also a highly enjoyable narrative permeated by a quality seldom to be encountered in scholarly literature: self-irony.Finally, Salamandra's monograph is a much needed reading in times in which the eagerness and haste to provide the general public with "breaking news" undoubtedly divert the attention from deeper social and political dynamics whose knowledge is much more enlightening in order to understand the forces and ideas at stake in the conflict, and their future developments.