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A repository of colonial intervisuality and memory: the Colonial Museum in Rome

Un dépôt d’intervisualité et de mémoire coloniales : le Musée colonial à Rome
Beatrice Falcucci

Résumés

Cet article, après avoir brièvement présenté l’histoire de l’ancien Musée colonial de Rome, se concentre sur les différentes formes de représentation et les diverses pratiques visuelles par lesquelles la propagande coloniale fasciste a été pleinement mise en œuvre au sein du musée. Il met ensuite en évidence son rôle de métaphore de la mémoire du colonialisme italien, en étudiant ses nombreuses évolutions, depuis la dissolution de l’empire colonial italien jusqu’à l’annonce en 2020 de la réorganisation de l’ancien Museo Coloniale, qui portera désormais le nom de Museo Italo-Africano Ilaria Alpi.

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Introduction. (Colonial) Heritage Discourse and the (inter)visuality of Italian colonialism

  • 1 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London, 2006.

1In 2006 the concept of Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) was introduced by Laurajane Smith in the book Uses of Heritage.1 Smith argued that there is a hegemonic discourse on material objects, sites, places that current generations (in the Global North) “must” care for, protect and revere so that they may be passed to nebulous future generation for their “education”, and to forge a sense of common identity based on the past. In this understanding of things, the “West” is deputed as the ideal custodian of these “masterpieces” of humanity.

  • 2 Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, quoted in Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Rapport sur la restitution du patr (...)

2Many of these concepts reverberate in the current discussion about colonial heritages in Europe. In 2017 French president Emmanuel Macron, in a speech to University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, suggested that in the coming five years “conditions be put in place for the temporary or definitive restitution” of African cultural heritage. Macron lated commissioned Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy to write a report on the issue, report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, widely seen as the starting point of restitution debates. Nonetheless, the issue of restitution requests is by no means new to the “Global North” collections. Already in 1978, the director-general of UNESCO, Senegalese Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, argued for the return to African societies of art, objects, and human remains kept in Western museums “whose absence causes the greatest anguish”.2

3On the 1st of July 2022 a Joint Declaration on the Return of Benin Bronzes was signed by Nigeria and Germany. The agreement set off the return from museums across Germany of over 1,130 items looted in the British sacking of Benin City in 1897, on the 125th anniversary year of the military attack. This event represents the single largest comparable restitution of stolen artifacts. German Culture Minister Claudia Roth quoted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech at the opening of Berlin’s controversial Humboldt Forum in September 2021, which urged that “we can’t change our past, but we can change our blindness to the past.” In February of that same year, just as Benin was celebrating with great fanfare the return of 26 objects from the Abomey Treasures held by France, Belgium sent the Democratic Republic of Congo the digital inventory of the 85,000 objects held in federal collections for the country to study, a prelude to the adoption of a federal restitution law last July. As colonial museums have returned to the center of debate in recent years (especially about the objects they store and how they are displayed), it is even more worthwhile to investigate their collection history and exhibition strategies. This paper intends to analyze a little-investigated case study, namely the Italian one.

  • 3 Gianmarco Mancosu, Vedere l’Impero. L’Istituto Luce e il colonialismo fascista, Milan, Mimesis, 2 (...)
  • 4 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1984-1992.
  • 5 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empire”, in Martin Jay, Sumathi Ram (...)
  • 6 The “protracted end” of the Italian presence in Africa with its social and cultural results, and (...)

4Recent trends in Italian studies are pointing out the significance of a vast array of visual practices as means to mould and spread colonial discourses and knowledge in liberal, fascist and even post-war Italy.3 Although several works have broached thorough analysis on discrete case-studies/media and artistic formats, a thorough reflection on the seamless connection among diverse visual practices is still in its early stages. My contribution aims to fit into this research path by analyzing practices of visual intertextuality within the Colonial Museum in Rome, a place where fascist colonial propaganda was fully implemented in a multitude of different forms of representation. After an introductory section dealing with the theoretical framing of the concept of intervisuality, the various interactions of the visual phenomena, and its methodological significance when applied to the study of colonial cultural practices, the article will tackle the case study of the Museo Coloniale, systematically reconstructing its history, its organizational structure, and its exhibitory mechanisms as part of the tools through which the Fascist regime spread colonial imaginations. Finally, the article will investigate the museum as “un lieu de mémoire (post)colonial”, to paraphrase Pierre Nora.4 In dialogue with international scholarship,5 the paper draws on original archival research to investigate the extent to which a multiplicity of different visual media, and their interplay, was employed to promote an imperial agenda in Italy, unfolding the colonial discourse across multiple media platforms. The “life” of the museum in the post-colonial period is considered as well, as a metaphor for the memory of Italian colonialism: the Museo Coloniale, in fact, contributed (and, as we will see, still contributes!) to the articulation of various kind of memories of the Italian colonial past.6

  • 7 Bernard S. Cohn, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism, and the Te (...)
  • 8 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, Durham, Duke Univer (...)
  • 9 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality”, Journal of Visual Culture, 5, 2006, p. 53-79.
  • 10 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York-London, New York UP (...)

5Scholars Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks argue that colonial states mobilized a wide range of visual technologies to legitimize their colonial power.7 Illustrations, cartography and then photography became decisive tools for conveying supposedly objective representations of the overseas functional to its domination; cinema became part of this scientific discourse, strengthening its reach and dissemination, especially regarding colonial themes.8 From a theoretical point of view, this analysis also draws inspiration from the work of Nicholas Mirzoeff, according to whom the ability to visualize empires (through different mediums) is constitutive of European modernity and becomes functional to the structuring of a specific order on the colonial world.9 On the other hand, the work of Henry Jenkins proved to be crucial to understanding from a conceptual point of view how colonial storytelling developed on several platforms simultaneously, not only in a multimedial way, but in an intermedial way,10 involving different audiences in the transmedial discursive signification of images and texts according to the fascist imperial agenda.

  • 11 Adolfo Mignemi, Immagine coordinata per un impero. Etiopia 1935-1936, Turin, Forma, 1984.
  • 12 Stephanie Malia Hom, “All empire is a stage...”, art. cited, p. 110.

6For the Italian case, in the 1980s Adolfo Mignemi was the first to jointly address the role of architecture, museums and exhibitions, cinema and arts in building a colonial imagery in Italy in his Immagine coordinata per un impero,11 which to this day continues to be a fundamental work for anyone wishing to approach the subject of the construction of an Italian colonial imaginary. Wanting to take the argument a stage further, however, one could identify specific sites where different media, objects and meanings conflagrated. Referring to colonial exhibitions in the Italian colonies Stephanie Malia Hom writes “things were not just mirrored, mimicked, or doubled, but perpetually multiplied and enframed... and misrecognized.”12 In this paper, I’ll argue that the Museo Coloniale in Rome was the place where this happened permanently, not simply through its displaying function of objects and documents of various formats, but also characterizing itself as a colonial hub for the archiving, management and dissemination of images and films. Peter Bloom has shown how in Europe visual technologies were used to measure and classify the difference between colonized and colonizers, which is inscribed into the very foundation of the colonial encounter. Within the museum, colonial fantasies and episteme were characterized by transmedial traits with the aim of developing discourses about African alterity, which assumed specific meanings in the transmedial relation between various platforms. The article will therefore explore a vast array of visual practices within the museum, by focusing on the connections between different media formats. What emerges is a colonial discourse that is simultaneously material and elusive, multifaceted and complex, reflecting the complex and contradictory articulations of the tangible and intangible memories of Italy’s colonial past, which were visually moulded in that exhibitory site.

  • 13 Gianmarco Mancosu, “Amnesia, aphasia and amnesty: The articulations of Italian colonial memory in (...)

7While looking at the intertwining of different technologies and cultural practices which was put into practice at the Museo Coloniale, the museum also lend itself as a metaphor for the memory of Italian colonialism, characterized by, we’ll see, a form of “selective forgetting”.13 In the last section of this paper, building on the 2020 announcement of the rearrangement of the former Colonial Museum in Rome with the new name Museo Italo-Africano Ilaria Alpi, I’ll discuss the most recent projects for the former museum and how they speak about the memory of colonialism today in Italy.

The Museo Coloniale in Rome: a multifaceted tool for Fascist propaganda

8The collections of the Colonial Museum can be effectively described as an arsenal of myths, symbols, and memories: whether running or closed, the museum seemed (and still seems) to always lend itself to formulate bigger assumptions about colonialism, the Italian nation and its character. Although it is difficult to measure the real impact of the museum on the Italian people, in the course of this paper I will try to highlight the fundamental junctures in its history and the debates surrounding its very existence, showing how they involved a wide range of actors.

  • 14 Maria Raffaella Pessolano, Assunta Bianco, Mariantonietta Picone, Le grandi esposizioni in Italia (...)
  • 15 On the circulation of exotic and orientalist discourses in Italy during early colonialism, see Gi (...)

9In united Italy, exhibitions ran parallel to the processes of national unification, accompanying the transition from the liberal era to fascism. Once unity was achieved, the pursuit of status on the international stage combined with the need to secure an Italian identity at an internal level, in a territory that until then had been politically and culturally fragmented. Exhibitions were often used for this purpose. The 1891 Italian National Exhibition was held in Palermo, the first in southern Italy, organized with the support of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, and hosted a special section dedicated entirely to the Eritrean colony. In 1906, the Great Expo of Work was held at Parco Sempione in Milan hosting fine arts displays, industrial and engineering exhibits, along with foreign pavilions. The International Exhibition of Art was a world’s fair held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the unification of Italy, marking the birth of the National Roman Museum. In the same year, another world’s fair was held in Turin, which focused more on science, technology, industry, and labor.14 Colonial exhibitions, already a feature of late 19th century Italy, developed in conjunction with other political imperatives: displays of raw materials and natural history specimens, as well as ethnographic collections, including masks and photographs of “natives”, provided comforting ideas of supremacy and control, and through them the colonies came to be understood by people less as something distant, and instead, as a palpable, material presence.15

  • 16 Umberto Giglio, “Un centro di vita. Il museo coloniale”, Rassegna italiana del Mediterraneo, 40, (...)
  • 17 Colonial sections and pavilions had already appeared in exhibitions in Turin in 1884, Palermo in (...)
  • 18 Carlo Rossetti, “Origini del Museo dell’Africa Italiana”, Africa Italiana, 4, 1941, p. 13-16; La  (...)
  • 19 S. Troilo, Pietre d’oltremare. Scavare, conservare, immaginare l’Impero (1899-1940), op. cit.; An (...)

10The Esposizione internazionale di Marina, di Igiene marinara e Mostra coloniale italiana inaugurated on May 23, 1914 in Genoa at the presence of the Italian royal family.16 In the Genoese exhibition the space reserved for the colonies was unprecedented:17 reconstructions of fortresses and mosques in their actual dimensions were erected, and in the space in front of the pavilions (designed in an eclectic style by the architect Luigi Coppedè) Turkish cannons and a campsite with so-called “Bedouin tents” were placed on display as the spoils of the “war” in Libya, which had just ended.18 The Libyan colonies of Tripolitania and Cirenaica were presented, from that first occasion, as the flagship of the Italian colonies overseas: Libya was believed to have been the seat of ancient and powerful civilizations, as testified to by the finds brought to light by Italian archaeological missions, not least the Roman remains, an aspect that would be later greatly used as an instrument of propaganda by Fascism.19

  • 20 Carlo Rossetti, “Origini del Museo dell’Africa Italiana,” art. cited.
  • 21 Beatrice Falcucci, “Visualizing colonial power: museum exhibitions and the promotion of imperiali (...)
  • 22 Gabriele Proglio, Libia 1911-12. Immaginari coloniali e italianità, Florence, Le Monnier, 2016; A (...)
  • 23 Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002.

11The Genoese exhibition, which proved to be a great popular success, coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. Despite the intention to proceed immediately after the conclusion of the exhibition with the creation of a colonial museum,20 which could be compared with its European counterparts,21 the war froze all ongoing projects. The situation changed with Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922. The Fascist party that had just risen to power wanted a museum that would serve to convey its policy of prestige and power, since (especially in the aftermath of the war and the peace agreements that were signed) Italy’s reputation abroad did not correspond to the image that the regime wished to give of itself.22 In the Twenties, Mussolini sought to increase Italy’s prestige and satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists. Among the regime’s goals was the acquisition of territory considered historically Italian in France (e.g., Nice) and Yugoslavia (e.g., Dalmatia), the expansion of Italy’s sphere of influence into the Balkans and the acquisition of more colonies in Africa, a process that would come to fulfilment in 1935 with the invasion of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the Empire.23

  • 24 Umberto Giglio, “Un centro di vita. Il museo coloniale”, art. cited.
  • 25 Luigi Federzoni, Venti mesi di azione coloniale, Milan, Mondadori, 1926, p. 163.

12Within this premises, in 1923 the Museo Coloniale was finally set up in the Palazzo della Consulta, where the Ministry of Colonies was housed at the time, and Umberto Giglio (1880-1944), an official at the Ministry, was appointed as its first director. The inauguration of the museum took place on 11th November in the presence of numerous prominent figures, including the Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile, Benito Mussolini, and the king of Italy.24 In the words of Luigi Federzoni, Ministry of the Colonies at the time, the museum was born with the precise aim of “awaken” the colonial consciousness of the Italians, direct “heirs” of Giulio Cesare, Marco Polo, and Cristoforo Colombo, yet incapable of building a modern empire in Africa as they took too little interest in their country’s colonies.25

  • 26 Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (eds), Rereading Travellers to the East Sh (...)

13Such discourses about “Italian” conquerors and explorers were often framed in revanchist terms, thus betraying the profound inferiority complex of the new Italian elite: against the more solid national narratives, not to mention the stronger economies, fully-fledged academic traditions and larger colonial empires of other European countries such as the United Kingdom and France, the Italian actors struggled to move from a position of perceived inferiority and historical dispossession to the place in the world that Italy allegedly deserved.26

  • 27 Enrico Castelli, David Laurenzi (eds.), Permanenze e metamorfosi dell’immaginario coloniale in It (...)
  • 28 David Arnold, “Europe, technology, and colonialism in the 20th century”, History and Technology, (...)
  • 29 Simona Troilo, “Visions of the Empire. The Ruins of the Roman Past in Fascist Libya” Nuncius, 37, (...)

14During the 1920s, as the so-called “pacification” of Libya progressed and Fascism organized its lines of expansion across the rest of the continent, an acceleration in the creation and dissemination of a coherent exotic African imagery happened. The circulation of books, films, but also comics and graphic novels, commercial advertisements, fashion and design, decorative objects, posters, photographs, trading cards, toys and games, illustrated journals and prints increased considerably, and mass-produced materials helped building the consensus around the colonial conquest.27 Traditional media (journals, books, conferences, paintings) and modern technologies (cinema, radio, and also travels28) popularized a discourse imbued with obsessive references to Italy’s Roman heritage and to its duty to spread civilization among “backward” peoples abroad.29 The decision to finally establish the Museo Coloniale is therefore to be understood within this context.

  • 30 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. xx (...)

15The exhibitions that had provided the impetus for the creation of the museum became the focal point of the entire cultural operation and an independent Mostra Campionaria permanente was annexed to the museum. This permanent trade show with its collection of objects, products and specimens was designed to publicize the existence of Italy’s African colonies both at home and at trade fairs around the world. In the Mostra samples of African raw materials (cotton, rubber, resins, woods, animal skins) were exhibited, along with the finished products made by Italian manufacturers using them, in order to demonstrate how these could be used successfully, inviting Italian entrepreneurs to invest in the colony. If the collection designed for traveling in Italy and abroad was conceived as dedicated to economic propaganda focusing on raw materials, the permanent collection dealt with more complex themes related to the identity and “continuity” of the Italian nation and character. In fact, the museum was to demonstrate the validity of Italian colonial claims in Africa, enticing the Italians to “retake their place” among the empires. Trite though it may be, this point implies a reworking of the past, keeping alive and building memory day by day in the museum. These are precisely the “tactics” Michel de Certeau wrote about as uses, appropriations, and re-employment utilized by people while interacting with objects, products, texts, and ideas.30 In this case, a strategy is deployed by the dominant classes and presented for passive consummation by ordinary people within the museum.

  • 31 An inventory in Maria Stella Margozzi (ed.), Viaggio in Africa. Dipinti e sculture delle collezio (...)
  • 32 Lidio Cipriani in his book Dal capo al Cairo defined the Italians’ “innate talents”, namely the a (...)
  • 33 A list of the documents (mainly autographs like letters, diaries, manuscripts, but also rare edit (...)

16For this multimedia construction of memory, the museum deployed all its resources. To illustrate the supposed inferiority of African populations the walls were covered with paintings of colonial subject,31 racist, anthropometric pictures of African “characters” (like those taken by anthropologist Lidio Cipriani, author of Manifest of Race),32 weapons of various types (mainly bows, arrows and shields from the Horn of Africa). In contrast, the “great “Italian explorers”, “pioneers” of Italian colonial “enterprises” often perished tragically on African soil, were remembered through paintings, their letters and diaries, and in some cases personal items such as religious texts, weapons or instruments for exploration (e.g., compasses), commemorative medals and memorabilia.33 Nineteenth-century explorers as Antonio Cecchi, Gustavo Bianchi, Manfredo Camperio and Eugenio Ruspoli were flanked by Andrea Corsali, who was in Ethiopia in 1517 on the instructions of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  • 34 Leopoldo Reck, “La missione italiana in Etiopia e la soluzione dei nuovi problemi”, Annali dell’A (...)
  • 35 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism, Manchest (...)
  • 36 Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano, Impressioni di caccia in Somalia italiana, Rome, Alfieri e Lacroix, 1 (...)
  • 37 The documentary films Hic Sunt Leones (1923), Il rifugio delle Plejadi (1926) and Il Sentiero del (...)
  • 38 Claudio Cerreti, La raccolta cartografica dell’Istituto Italo-Africano. Presentazione del fondo e (...)

17If the relics of ancient travellers testified to the legitimacy of Italian aspirations, and the images of African populations to their need for Italian involvement,34 hunting trophies and multimedia materials concerning African big-game hunting have a variety of meaning. In the Museum images and narratives about the untameable and dangerous flora and fauna and hunting safaris spread transmedially: animal trophies (of the so-called “big-five” in particular) were blatant metaphors of the desire to dominate the outer world epistemically and materially.35 A whole room, in fact, was dedicated to the hunting trophies of Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano (1890-1959). Zammarano, a soldier, explorer in the service of the Ministry of Colonies, writer, and filmmaker, played a significant role in the popularization of colonial topics in Fascist Italy between the 1920s and the 1930s. In his activity, Zammarano combined popular editions of books (e.g., by the publishing house Mondadori),36 the photographic medium, and the use of motion picture technologies,37 ensuring the circulation of his work in films projected in public events (we can presume also within the museum itself, which had a projection room). However, the museum did not only speak to visitors about the emotional dimension of colonial conquest: various types of maps38 and scale models expressed the quantitative, measurable size of Italy’s overseas possessions. On display, the colonial idea could assume a multitude of different forms of representation (a lion skin, photographs of Roman ruins that have emerged from the sand after centuries of supposed neglect, heartfelt letters calling for penetration into Ethiopia, samples of Somali cotton...) being communicated via diverse visual practices.

  • 39 Guglielmo Narducci, “Il Museo dell’Africa italiana”, L’Italia d’oltremare, 6-9, 1941, p. 140-141.
  • 40 Silvana Palma, L’Africa nella collezione fotografica dell’IsIAO, Il fondo Eritrea-Etiopia, Rome-N (...)
  • 41 For example, to provide entertainment and keep people’s spirits high on the so-called navi bianch (...)
  • 42 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 5, “Films in carico al Museo coloniale”, “Elenchi dei film in (...)
  • 43 These two films are by Comerio Film. Luca Comerio was a famous photographer and filmmaker who wor (...)
  • 44 Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM) 1934-36, b. 2046 (...)
  • 45 For a detailed analysis of the different kind of films kept in the cineteca across its period of (...)

18Finally, the Museum’s fototeca and cineteca (photo and film libraries) were to provide “documents relating to our colonies to Italian and foreign writers and journalists; this is a work of colonial propaganda of great value.”39 The photo library, which contained thousands and thousands of photographs, was organized around themes, such as exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and geographically, and publishing houses (like the prestigious Treves) and newspapers, as well as the Ministry of the Colonies itself, drew from the photo library for illustrations for their publications and volumes.40 By contrast, the film library, while also functioning as a “depot” of colonial materials for the regime, which could then acquire and distribute them where necessary,41 allowed on-site screenings of ethnographic documentaries, short films, fiction films and newsreels. In the inventories of the film library of the Museo Coloniale42 is possible to find titles among the earliest films made in the Italian colonies like Cirene o Dalle spiaggie sirtiche al Gebel,43 dating back to the Italo-Turkish war. The conflict to conquer Libya (1911-1912), in fact, was the first globally overexposed mediatic war, air machinery served to cast images that, for the first time in history, used aerial pictures and footage. The film gazes from the above amplified the idea that military and cultural technologies could visualize and dominate the soon-to-be colonial landscape. The Museum, moreover, could count on the collaboration of Istituto Luce, which began to deposit at the cineteca its films44 describing the business potential of the colonies (Le nostre colonie; Miniera Eritrea; Inaugurazione della fiera di Tripoli), visits by state figures (Il viaggio di S.E. Lessona nella Somalia italiana; Il viaggio di S.M. il re in Eritrea; Il trionfale viaggio di S.E. Mussolini in Tripolitania), and the famous newsreels Giornali Luce.45 The implementation of film shows of various kind (scientific/ethnographic footage; propaganda documentaries; feature films) as well as the relationship established with the Istituto Luce prompt an interpretation of the film section as a pivotal component of fascism’s imperial propaganda within that exhibitory space.

  • 46 L. Santomauro, “La nuova sede del Museo Coloniale a Villa Borghese”, L’Azione coloniale, November (...)
  • 47 As Ilaria Porciani noted, museums (especially war museums) “have had a powerful role in kindling (...)
  • 48 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 21, “Miscellanea”, Note by prof. Carlo Conti Rossini, 1943.
  • 49 James E. Cutting, “The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference”, in Paul Locher, Colin Mart (...)
  • 50 Guida Guido, Il Museo dell’Impero d’Italia, Bologna, Cappelli, 1941.

19The need for more space for display and fruition led in the early 1930s to a move of the museum to premises next to the zoological garden, a once again non-coincidental proximity between human and animal otherness, leading to the creation of a common exotic horizon.46 The design of the monumental entrance of the new museum in Via Aldrovandi, next to the zoological garden of Villa Borghese was informed by the experience of the great Fascist Exhibition of 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, as was the organization of the halls, especially the entrance hall, which showed a wealth of weapon and insignia stolen from the “enemy”.47 Despite the larger spaces, the Museum, which held at the time as many as 11,700 objects, still presented itself not so much as a scientific institution like its European counterparts, which it claimed to be inspired by,48 but as a place exclusively dedicated to propaganda. Without any real organized narrative, but rather through what James Cutting calls “mere exposure”, the museum played with the audience’s instincts: each visitor would made connections and assumptions individually, while visiting the museum’s rooms.49 The Museum, even in its new location, was just an endless series of images and objects without any contextualization, in rooms adorned with drapes, flags, photographs of human “characters” and landscapes and paintings. The regime’s museological approach – essentially, a hoard of items which were supposedly self-explanatory – was described explicitly as such: “open to observation and analysis that does not need man’s arbitrary commentary [...] It is a lesson, because it brings us closer to the truth.”50 According to this conception, the exhibition mystically transcended its material form and did not need any explanation, as the objects could speak for themselves beyond mere words or logic.

  • 51 Following the attack on Italy’s High Command armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleash (...)
  • 52 For an analysis of the concept of martyrdom in colonial collections see Beatrice Falcucci, “Les “ (...)
  • 53 G.B., “Il Museo coloniale dell’Impero. I cimeli della guerra italo-africana”, L’Illustrazione ita (...)
  • 54 Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, Harvard Unive (...)

20One striking case is General Rodolfo Graziani’s bloodstained uniform, on display in a hall entirely dedicated to him. The uniform was that worn by Graziani on February 19, 1937, the day of his assassination attempt in Addis Ababa by Ethiopian partisans.51 The intent, by putting it on display, was to arouse the public’s emotion and indignation at the ruthlessness of the Ethiopians, presenting Graziani as a victim, exhibiting his own blood and thus emphasizing the General’s willingness to offer his life in an extreme patriotic sacrifice defending Italy’s new, hard-earned African possessions.52 The arrival of new artefacts and objects from the Ethiopian campaign necessitated a restructuring of the display: in 1937 the Museum was inaugurated a third time with a room reserved for the cannons recovered in Adwa, also on display in the museum courtyard.53 On March 1, 1896, near the town of Adwa the Ethiopian forces defeated the Italian invading army, this decisive victory thwarted the campaign of the Kingdom of Italy to expand its colonial empire in the Horn of Africa for forty years and Adwa became a pre-eminent symbol of pan-africanism.54 The Italian humiliation of 1896 became a national trauma which demagogic leaders strove to avenge, Italy’s revanchism was finally redeemed by bringing back the Italian cannons lost at Adwa: objects with a high emotional value, especially when displayed in dozens near to Michele Cammarano’s massive painting La Battaglia di Dogali (1888, nowadays on display at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome), that recalled another defeat suffered by the Italians at Dogali in 1887. The heroism of the Italian soldiers, true martyrs for the colonial cause, was evidenced by the difficult conditions in which they operated in order to preserve Italian overseas possessions, from Dogali to World War II: as evidence of this, a hard, blackened sample of the bread that was distributed daily to the Italian soldiers besieged by the British in Gondar in September 1941 was on display in the museum in a small glass case, as a precious item, testimony to the sacrifice and heroism of Italian soldiers.

21In the new location of the Museum in Via Aldrovandi some stanze dei precursori (“pioneers’ rooms”) were dedicated exclusively to the so-called precursors of colonial exploits (Manfredo Camperio, Ugo Ferrandi, Orazio Antinori), whom Fascism wanted to point out to new generations as men worthy of admiration. Thus, creating an intellectual path linking the figures such as Cardinal Guglielmo Massaia (1809-1889) to Rodolfo Graziani, without any need for explanation.

  • 55 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 40, f. 1, “Sommario. L’azione culturale esplicata mediante mostre, esposizioni, (...)

22Despite such a “mere exposure approach”, and as a way to create a sort of consistent narrative within the museum’s activity, visuals, speech, and texts were to be strongly interrelated; in the new, more spacious location, lectures were held regularly, during which pictures and short films were shown. While the museum’s premises served as a venue for film screenings and conferences, the objects themselves often left the museum to be exhibited at events such as the Expo du Sahara of 1934 in Paris, the Mostra Triennale delle Terre d’Oltremare in Naples or the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.55 Such a circulation of objects in Italy and abroad stimulates further reflection on the modalities through which the same object could have been re-signified in different context according to different visual/exhibitory transnational practices.

  • 56 “Il museo coloniale, gioiello dell’Urbe”, L’Italia Coloniale, September 15, 1937, p. 137.

23In July 1937 the museum inaugurated a third time with the new name Museo dell’Africa Italiana. With the occupation of Ethiopia, many objects came to Rome to be exhibited in the Museum, with the aim of bearing witness to “the contribution of heroism and blood of the soldiers and blackshirts” in finally gaining Italy its empire.56 A few months later the museum would close, to remain closed for ten years, until 1947. This peculiar reopening of the Museum, at a time when Fascism had been defeated and the colonies lost, will be addressed in the concluding section of this paper.

The Museo Coloniale within the European colonial context

  • 57 Silvia Cecchini, “Musei e mostre d’arte negli anni Trenta: l’Italia e la cooperazione intellettua (...)
  • 58 Patrizia Dragoni, “Accessible à tous: la rivista “Mouseion” per la promozione del ruolo sociale d (...)
  • 59 In 1932 the principal leader of the resistance in Libya, Omar al-Mukhtar, was captured and execut (...)
  • 60 Maddalena Carli, “L’Italia all’Exposition coloniale internationale et des pays d’outre-mer, Paris (...)
  • 61 Guide officiel de la section italienne à l’Exposition coloniale Paris 1931, Paris, De Rosa, 1931, (...)

24The nation-forming of Italy through colonialism, also seen as a way to bridge the gap between itself and other European countries, has been discussed through the lenses of the establishment of the Colonial Museum. The following section assesses the museum’s participation in the Expo du Sahara in Paris in 1934, placing it within the framework of European colonial culture, exhibitions, and international relations during the 1930s. In terms of collection and display, Silvia Cecchini noted that the 1930s represented a watershed in the history of museology,57 and Patrizia Dragoni and Giovanni Pinna have argued for the emergence of real “media propaganda” through museums and exhibitions in the same period.58 The Expo du Sahara offers important insights into Italo-French relations in the years immediately preceding Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the ways in which Fascist Italy sought national and international legitimacy through the medium of exhibitions. The Paris exhibition, staged by the European powers after years of clashes, was also a physical representation of the so-called “colonial concord” and “peaceful” partition of North Africa, processes in which Italy’s role was fundamental.59 Preceding the Exposition du Sahara, the Colonial Museum participated in the important 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale et des pays d’outre-mer, also in Paris, which included European powers as well as the United States and Japan. On this occasion, Italy displayed “the myth of empire” by playing with the concepts of Latin identity and the Roman past.60 The Italian exhibition reproduced the Basilica of Leptis Magna surrounded with pools and obelisks inspired by ancient Rome and white-domed marabouts typical of Libya. Meanwhile the pavilion dedicated to Rhodes (an Italian colony since 1912) recalled the island’s medieval past and was inspired by the buildings of the Knights of Malta.61 Through its exhibits, in fact, Italy proposed a reinterpretation of its past, both distant and recent, in a colonial key, thus standing in its own right as a colonialist nation on par with France, Britain, and Portugal. The 1931 Parisian event prepared Italy’s participation in the Exposition du Sahara three years later, a thematic exhibition dedicated to the well-circumscribed area of North Africa, now entirely controlled by colonial powers.

  • 62 Archives du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET), f.c, 2AM1C2, Letter from Henri-Paul Eydoux t (...)
  • 63 Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950, Ithaca- (...)
  • 64 MET, Guide Illustré Exposition du Sahara, 15 Mai–28 Oct 1934.
  • 65 Corrado Zoli, “Il Sahara Italiano all’Esposizione del Trocadero di Parigi”, L’Illustrazione itali (...)
  • 66 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, Rome, Tipografia della Camera dei Depu (...)
  • 67 MET, f.a, 2AM1C2, Letter from Umberto Giglio to Georges Henri Rivière, January 27, 1934.
  • 68 Francesco Corò, “L’esposizione internazionale del Sahara al Trocadéro di Parigi”, L’avvenire di T (...)
  • 69 “Primati nostri: l’Esposizione del Sahara e il contributo italiano”, Il Popolo d’Italia, June 24, (...)
  • 70 Mario Dorato, “Italia e Sahara”, Oltremare, June 1934.
  • 71 Alessandro Volterra, Maurizio Zinni, Il leone, il giudice e il capestro. Storia e immagini della (...)
  • 72 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, op. cit., p. 72-76.
  • 73 Enrico De Agostini, Guida del Museo, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana, 1958, p. 18.

25The Exposition du Sahara was held at the Trocadéro, from 15 May to 28 October 1934 and visited by over 66,000 people,62 making it the most successful event in the museum’s history.63 The exhibition occupied eight rooms: two of its largest sections were devoted to Italy and France, the real protagonists of European colonial action in the Sahara.64 The exhibition was intended as a colonial propaganda event, both scientific and popular, which documented the anthropology and ethnography of the Saharan peoples, displayed examples of medieval cartography, highlighted archaeological, paleontological, and mineralogical discoveries, and exhibited specimens of natural history, while also playing on the visitors’ exotic imagination. The display of the materials and the organization of the Italian section of the exhibition had been prepared by the Colonial Museum, which had coordinated the loans of materials from other Italian institutions and museums65 and produced an illustrated guide of the section for the occasion.66 Umberto Giglio, director of the Museo Coloniale and head of the Italian organizing committee, had asked for a larger space than that granted to the other colonial powers,67 thus creating an exhibition that could challenge that of their French hosts.68 Italy organized its section to celebrate “the fascinating desert tracks of the Sahara on which Fascist Italy revives trade and restores life”69 with frequent references to Libya as an ancient Roman province.70 Archaeological finds, mainly from Gherma, were restored and presented to the public: amphorae, funerary steles, and ancient pottery were arranged, illuminated, and described to enhance and highlight Italy’s conservation efforts. At the same time, pictures of military operations and aerial photographs testified to Italy’s final conquest of the Libyan Sahara. Through the Italian section of the exhibition, Fascism sought to highlight the presence of Italian explorers in the Sahara, trying to build legitimacy for the recent brutal conquest of Libya that had just been completed, using hangings, gas, and deportations.71 Besides rich ethnographic material, the Italian section presented rare examples of ancient cartography.72 Ancient maps of the North African region produced by “Italians” such as Stefano da Monte Oliveto in 1578 were exhibited, as well as the 1325 planisphere by the Genoese Giovanni da Carignano and the famous world map by Fra Mauro of 1467, lent by the Società Geografica Italiana for the occasion.73 The Sahara was presented as an area that had always been known and studied by the Italians, who had finally “returned” to it.

  • 74 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, op. cit., p. 8-10.
  • 75 Ottorino Centola, “Conferenza sahariana di S.E. Corrado Zoli”, Azione coloniale, June 14, 1934.

26The committee for the organization of the Italian section was composed of colonial officials like Umberto Giglio and Enrico Cerulli, while the scientific committee included scholars such as Armando Maugini, Nello Puccioni, Ardito Desio, Raffaele Gestro, Saverio Patrizi, Edoardo Zavattari, and Lidio Cipriani (whose plaster face casts, and anthropometric photographs were exhibited). Institutions including the Istituto Geografico Militare of Florence (IGM), the Accademia d’Italia, the Museo di Antropologia e Etnologia of Florence, the Istituto botanico of Pisa, the Società Geografica Italiana (SGI) of Rome, the Istituto Agricolo Coloniale Italiano (IACI), as well as the colonial governments, took part in the exhibition.74 A cycle of conferences complemented the Italian exhibition. A screening of a silent film about the Italian capture of the oasis of Jufra at the Société de Géographie was accompanied by a talk by Corrado Zoli, journalist and former governor of Eritrea.75

  • 76 Reynold S. Salerno, “Britain, France and the Emerging Italian Threat, 1935-38”, in Martin S. Alex (...)

27These conferences and invited talks were emblematic of a period of Italo-French “colonial cooperation” after decades of tensions on the Saharan border. It was a very short period if we consider that only a year after the exhibition Italy would invade Ethiopia, ending the moment of colonial cooperation and placing France and Britain in clear opposition to Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions. Until early 1935, the British and French saw Italy as a nation committed to collective European security and had signed a series of agreements that seemed to indicate genuine international cooperation, but Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and rapprochement with Germany changed this.76 At the Trocadéro, France, Britain, and Italy all presented themselves as “pacifying” powers, and Italy was pleased to finally be fully integrated into the assembly of European colonial powers. In January 1935, Giglio wrote to Rivière:

  • 77 MET, f.a. 2AM1C2, Letter from Umberto Giglio to Georges Henri Rivière, January 10, 1935.

The magnificent days of the Franco-Italian conversations have made me think that the Sahara Exhibition probably served some purpose in the political field as well. The words pronounced on that occasion by Minister Laval to Italy and the Duce certainly had a significance that went beyond the contingency of the moment.77

28Beyond the competition between nations, the exhibition celebrated the evident dominance of European technology over “hostile” African nature, the ordering European spirit, politically and intellectually, as well as the “collective” colonial experience which collapsed the significant differences between states and the heterogeneity of the subjected territories. Imperialism was thus presented in Paris as a necessary task and burden for which Europeans collectively assumed full responsibility.

A colonial museum (officially) without colonies: the Fifties

  • 78 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 21, f. 130, “Riapertura del Museo coloniale”, Letter from M.A Vitale to the Dir (...)
  • 79 Antonio M. Morone, “La fine del colonialismo italiano tra storia e memoria”, Storicamente, 12, 20 (...)

29It has already been mentioned that the Museum closed in 1937, only to reopen ten years later in 1947.78 Within a decade a world war had begun and ended, Fascism had fallen, Italy had experienced German and Allied occupation, resistance and an institutional referendum. The Italian empire had been swept away. After WWII a discussion on the disposition of the former Italian colonies in Africa happened at the United Nations, as Italy wanted to maintain at least the pre-Fascist colonies. Despite the genuine anti-fascist ethos that inspired the Governi d’unità Nazionale (National Unity Cabinet), no criticism, not even partial, of colonialism was voiced, in fact, the contrary. Italy’s diplomatic efforts aimed at regaining a form of direct influence over Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, where significant Italian communities were still present.79

  • 80 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, “Restituzione all’Etiopia di oggetti asportati”, March 9, 1946.
  • 81 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio Studi, b. 21, “Nota riservata”, September 27, 1948.
  • 82 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio studi, b. 19, “Materiale archeologico e bibliografico proveniente dai Muse (...)
  • 83 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio studi, b. 19, “Materiale archeologico e bibliografico proveniente dai Muse (...)
  • 84 Simona Troilo, “Casta e bianca. La Venere di Cirene tra Italia e Libia (1913- 2008)”, Memoria e R (...)

30Whitin this context, the first requests for restitution to Italy, and in particular to the Colonial Museum (since 1937 renamed the Museo dell’Africa Italiana) came as early as March 1946, even before the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In fact, Ethiopia presented a list of archaeological objects and artefacts taken from the African country by Italy that included, among others, the Stele of Axum, the Lion of Judah, the crown jewels and imperial throne and ancient Coptic books.80 In order to discourage this type of requests, the “Room of the Throne of the Negus” was disassembled at the request of Giuseppe Brusasca (at the time Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs in the Christian Democratic Party) and its objects, whose symbolic and emotional significance was recognized, were “conveniently placed in storage” to protect them from further requests for restitution.81 The documentation of the Ministry of Italian Africa, which would only be dissolved in 1953, shows how in 1947 it was the Allied Commission that asked Italy for the return of all objects taken from the former Libyan colony.82 The Ministry of Italian Africa had, however, already expressed its willingness not to return these artefacts, echoing what the Undersecretary of State had stated a few months earlier, namely that the precious artefacts would be “safer” in Italy rather than in Libya “due to unforeseeable events, the collections could be subjected to manipulation or destruction that would compromise the integrity of the precious collections.”83 It is interesting to note how such long-standing argument is still used today by those who oppose the return of objects and artefacts from Europe to Africa, as in the famous case of the return of the Venus of Cyrene.84

  • 85 Gianmarco Mancosu, “Risentimento coloniale. I “nemici” dell’Italia e la retorica sul ritorno in A (...)
  • 86 However, such diplomatic efforts brought to a result far below expectations. Italy only achieved (...)

31In 1947 Italy signed the Treaty of Peace, a few months later at the United Nations the Memorandum on the Italian Colonies, drawn up on behalf of the Italian Government by Ambassador Giuliano Cora and the scholar Enrico Cerulli, was under discussion. The Memorandum legitimized the request for the restitution of the former colonies based on what Italy had done to with its “civilizing work”: Il lavoro italiano.85 The work of the Italian colonists, together with the policies of (alleged) economic and social “development” undertaken by the then colonial governments, were the arguments par excellence on which Italian claims were based, and at the same time became very useful tools to start proposing that sweetened and good-natured reinterpretation of the colonial past that stressed the “civilization” and “development” of the colonies, forgetting to account for the many discriminations, violence and wars perpetrated in the colonies. The Italians in the former colonies were then “workers” rather than “colonialists”, a narrative which become instrumental to envision a new presence of Italy in Africa.86

  • 87 Vitale was an official of the Ministry of the Colonies and former prefect of Derna before his rem (...)
  • 88 Il problema coloniale: Testimonianze della nostra civiltà in Africa, in La Settimana Incom, 00192 (...)
  • 89 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 948, “Museo Coloniale Settimana Incom”, Letter from Massimo Ad (...)
  • 90 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s. f. 948, “Museo Coloniale Settimana Incom”, Letter from M.M. More (...)
  • 91 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, “Museo Coloniale 1945-55”, f. 113, “Museo coloniale-cineteca. Cartella gene (...)

32In September 1948 Undersecretary Giuseppe Brusasca (DC) and the second director of the Museum Massimo Adolfo Vitale (1885-1968),87 who took over Giglio in the summer of 1944, organized a visit to the Museo dell’Africa Italiana while at the UN the Memorandum on the Italian Colonies was under discussion.88 Vitale, in fact, had invited the Industria Cortometraggi Milano (Incom) to film the visit of the elderly explorer Leopoldo Traversi and Brusasca to the Museum, to film “very interesting colonial propaganda.”89 Already several months earlier, in December 1947, the Director General of the Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, Martino Mario Moreno, urged the production of a film “taking parts from five or six different colonial films of the cineteca to offer the public a documentation of Italian work in Africa, purified of any too open reference to the past twenty years.”90 The Incom newsreel titled Testimonianze della nostra civiltà in Africa, after some passages about the Paris Peace Conference, was entirely staged at the Museum. Brusasca, accompanied by Traversi, was filmed while visiting the exhibition, while Guido Notari’s voice-over lists the alleged benefits brought by Italy to Africa. The objects on display in the Museum were shown to corroborate this narrative, starting with Giuseppe Sapeto and the original documents of the 1869 acquisition of Assab Bay, the arms of Vittorio Bottego recovered in Daga Roba, logs of former slaves freed by Vincenzo Filonardi, first Governor of Italian Somalia, and some scale models such as those of the Arch of Marcus Aurelius in Tripoli and the Roman theatre in Sabratha. The apologetic newsreel was applauded by the cabinet of the Minister of Italian Africa (a post then held ad interim by De Gasperi).91

  • 92 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 5, “Films in carico al Museo coloniale”, “Elenchi dei film in (...)
  • 93 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 1, “Museo Coloniale. Ricognizione Films-Deposito films presso (...)

33In these months Vitale, in the view of the reopening of the Museum, reflected on removing films with titles referring too explicitly to Fascism from the cineteca,92 but when the idea of a resumption of “pro-colonial” screenings at the Museum was considered, the head of the Ufficio Studi Martino Mario Moreno noted that these films were impossible to use “because there is so much, too much fascism.”93 Precisely because of the impossibility, despite the attempts, to separate colonialism and fascism, the Museum was unable to find its own key to (self-) interpretation in the post-war period, and, especially after the dissolution of the Ministero dell’Africa Italiana in 1953.

  • 94 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio Studi, b. 21, “Oggetti di valore storico richiesti dal governo libico”, Ma (...)

34If, as we have seen, the 1947 request for restitution was ignored, the problem resurfaced more forcefully a few years later, in 1955. In documentation declassified only in 2015, Vitale, attests that in 1955 the Museum received a formal request from the Libyan government for the return of objects belonging to the “Arab leaders of the rebellion”, enclosing a list in which Omar Al-Mukhtar’s glasses and wallet also appeared.94 In the document, Vitale mentions that the Minister of Italian Africa had informally agreed to return some objects belonging to resistance leaders to Libya, but that he was waiting for official dispositions. Today Al-Mukhtar’s glasses and wallet are still in the possession of the Italian state, kept in the Museo delle Civiltà (MuCiv), in the deposits where the collections of the former Colonial Museum are stored.

Between memory and amnesia: the collection of the Museo from Faccetta nera to today

35It would be a mistake to think that the Colonial Museum was simply ignored for a long period of time after the dissolution of the Ministero dell’Africa Italiana. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the museum continued to participate with its collections in events such as Fiera del Levante in Bari and Fiera del Mediterraneo in Palermo, organizing festivals of “African films” (such as the one in collaboration with Fondazione Cini in Venice) and hosting events such as the second Congresso mondiale degli scrittori e artisti neri in Rome in March 1959 organized by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa and attended by writers, philosophers and politicians such as Bernard Binlin Dadié, Gerard Sekoto, Jean Prince-Mars.

  • 95 In fact, the episode, although only 15 minutes long, is rich in facets and content, such as an in (...)
  • 96 Felice Liperi, Faccette nere. Inni e canzoni all’origine del razzismo italiano, Rome, manifestoli (...)
  • 97 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia. Race and Disabled Histories in France”, Public Culture, 23-1 (...)

36With its closure in 1971, the Museum lie abandoned through the following decades, but not forgotten, as witnessed in an episode of the RAI weekly tv-show Odeon. Tutto quanto fa spettacolo. In fact, in 1976 Odeon devoted an episode called Faccetta nera schiava d’amore to the Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya (1951) interviewed by journalist Sergio Giordani. On a travel to Italy in 1972, Araya quite randomly recorded a commercial for coffee, several roles in movies followed (mostly sexy roles in B-movies) and also a feature in the Italian version of Playboy magazine in 1974. Her interview for Odeon re-proposes, albeit partly criticizing them, numerous colonial clichés about black women, the invasion of Ethiopia as an “adventure”, the continuity between the Roman Empire and the fascist Empire.95 Moreover, the episode itself is named after the 1935 song Faccetta nera.96 What it is interesting to note is that during the Odeon episode, among colonial archival images and shots of the so-called quartiere africano, and the fascist architectural heritage at Foro Italico and Stazione Termini in Rome, also some images of the Museum are shown. The former Museo dell’Africa Italiana is presented in darkness, with papers and maps thrown about, various kind of objects, paintings and animal trophies piled up in dark rooms. The voice-over narrates about “hippos, rhinoceroses, stuffed zebu awaiting a government measure that considers the changed geopolitical conditions. For now, the old Museo dell’Africa Italiana remains shrouded in darkness like a guilt to be forgotten. Every country has its skeleton in the closet”. The fact that part of the episode of Odeon was recorded in the colonial museum is certainly significant. A case of “aphasia” rather than “amnesia”, as Faccetta nera schiava d’amore doesn’t address the absence of colonialism in the public discourse, but rather the inability to comprehend and articulate a critical discourse about the colonial past (regarded as “a skeleton in the closet”).97

37In 1977 a major theft in the numismatic and gold collections of the Museum happened; its collections were later dispersed to various institutes (Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Museo della Fanteria and Museo del Genio in Rome...) and stored in warehouses before being brought together starting from 2012 in the Museum now called Museo delle Civiltà at the EUR district, an area of Rome which, in Mussolini’s mind, had to materialize the fascist revolution by celebrating its twentieth anniversary. The area was originally chosen in the 1930s as the site for the 1942 World’s Fair (that never took place due to World War II) which Benito Mussolini planned to open to celebrate twenty years of fascism.

  • 98 For a more detailed analysis of the 2020 press-conference see Beatrice Falcucci, “Il Museo Coloni (...)
  • 99 Ilaria Alpi (1961-1994) was an Italian journalist killed in Mogadishu. At the time of her murder, (...)

38On the May 25, 2020, a press conference dedicated to the rearrangement of the Museum took place, virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic, at the Museo delle Civiltà.98 During the press conference, a project for the collections of the former Colonial Museum was presented: they were to be displayed in 2021 in a new museum to be called Museo Italo-Africano Ilaria Alpi. It is interesting to note that the name Italo-Africano reminds a rather generic historical connection whilst not explicitly mentioning the colonial phase and the distinctive Eurocentric posture which informed the colonial museology. In this context and considering the problematic and partially unacknowledged results of colonial legacies in Italian society, the inherently problematic nature of such cultural and material heritage seemed to remain hidden, as does the predatory way with which the collections of the former Museum were assembled. The dedication to Ilaria Alpi,99 also appears to be not thoroughly conceived. Naming the ex-colonial museum after an Italian personality leaves, for the umpteenth time, the former colonial subjects in the background, an exotic set-in which Europeans move. In fact, precisely Alpi’s status as “martyr” was being played up: this name embedded the museum in a larger history of Italian “sacrifice” in service to the colonies and their inhabitants and would situate the museum in a broader memorial topography, thereby linking it to places like Siracusa with its Monumento ai Caduti d’Africa, the Sacrario militare dei caduti d’oltremare (Bari), the Monumento ai caduti d’Africa (Padua).

  • 100 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4obZIAecsw
  • 101 https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/2020/06/17/white-tinted-glasses-on-the-difficult-herita (...)
  • 102 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwnat4ABrY8

39The quite polarizing debate surrounding the new project saw some, such as the Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego, defend the management’s choices and the need for a new museum,100 while others such as artist Alessandra Ferrini made a profound critique.101 A more measured approach prevailed, as in 2021 the MuCiv, shelving for the moment the idea of a new displaying of the entire collection of the former Museum, presented the project of the temporary exhibition called Unveiled Storages. Using original cabinets from the 19th century a selection of objects was on display: they were wrapped in cellophane, seen through the transparency of some text banners asking questions like “How to represent the colonial discourse?” “How to avoid the celebration?” “How to deconstruct the myth of the Roman empire?” “How to exhibit violence?”. The most recent change in the museum’s management led to a new press conference on July 19, 2022, which effectively disavowed what had been said up to that point in the previous director’s plans for the museum: art historian Andrea Viliani, new director of the MuCiv, envisages not so much a new display of the collections, but rather a program of artist residencies by mainly Afro-descendant activist and artists to create works in dialogue with those of the former colonial museum, currently still in storage.102 A new approach that is also not devoid of pitfalls, as in the European context museums using this strategy attracted criticism of tokenism and art-washing, condemning the reductionist and essentializing nature of identity-based curatorial strategies.

  • 103 https://www.senato.it/leg/18/BGT/Schede/FascicoloSchedeDDL/ebook/55169.pdf

40Nonetheless, the new director’s choices have also been criticized with opposing arguments in the Italian Senate question time, during the sitting no. 459 and 462 of August 3 and September 6, 2022. On that occasion a number of senators from Movimento 5 Stelle addressed the Minister of Culture Franceschini inquiring about the MuCiv curatorial practices. The senators questioned “the newly appointed director of the ‘Museum of Civilisations’, Andrea Viliani [for] unscrupulously riding the international wave of decolonization (which already in the 1970s had led to the closure of the Colonial Museum, founded in 1923)” and his “decolonization initiatives taken on the back of impulses sometimes no less blind and violent than the “colonialist” impulses of the 19th and 20th centuries.”103 At the moment, a new, temporary display of objects and documents in an exhibition called “The Museum of Opacity” is soon to be inaugurated at MuCiv, and surely will sparkle (one more time) some discussion.

Conclusion

41Monitoring the debate surrounding the reorganization of the collections of the former colonial museum in Rome proves extremely useful for the scholars dealing with the memory of Italian and European colonialism. The museum, as we have seen, did not only have an impact on Italians during fascism, but also with its activities during the war (e.g., the screenings organized by the museum’s film library on the navi bianche) and in the post-war period (the participation in and organization of exhibitions and festivals). The museum, in its intricate and fragmented trajectory, had a relevance in European events, as well as in Italian affairs. The attempt to use the museum collections to influence public opinion in Italy and elsewhere at the time of the Paris Conference, testifying to the “good colonizers” nature of the Italians, was also discussed. It is not easy to estimate the real cultural impact of any kind of museum on its visitors; nonetheless, the traces that the colonial museum left in the imagination is self-evident, for example from the use that was made of its spaces by RAI.

42The Museo Coloniale in Rome with its multitude of different forms of representation and diverse visual practices has had (and continues to have) many different (after)lives. What strikes is how its organization/display/debate always managed to photograph moments of Italian politics and society and its relationship with the memory of Italian colonialism. An object of particular interest, especially at a time in history when questions are being asked about restitution and ethical issues within museums that originated during the colonial period.

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Notes

1 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London, 2006.

2 Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, quoted in Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle, November 2018, restitutionreport2018.com, p. 15-16.

3 Gianmarco Mancosu, Vedere l’Impero. L’Istituto Luce e il colonialismo fascista, Milan, Mimesis, 2022; Simona Troilo, Pietre d’oltremare. Scavare, conservare, immaginare l’Impero (1899-1940), Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2021; Maddalena Carli, Vedere il fascismo. Arte e politica nelle esposizioni del regime (1928-1942), Rome, Carocci, 2021; Lucas Iannuzzi, “Lidio Cipriani (1892–1962), the Photographs in His Popular Science Literature”, Nuncius, 36, 2021, p. 611-645; Beatrice Falcucci, “Visualizing Colonial Power. Museum Exhibitions and the Promotion of Imperialism in France, Belgium, and Italy”, Nuncius, 36, 2021, p. 676-722; Priscilla Manfren, “La Somalia coloniale tra arte e propaganda: opere e vicende espositive di alcuni autori italiani”, in Giuliana Tomasella (ed.), Il confronto con l’alterità tra Ottocento e Novecento. Aspetti critici e proposte visive, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2020, p. 59-74; Stephanie Malia Hom, “All empire is a stage. Italian colonial exhibition in continuum”, in Daniel E. Coslett (ed.), Neocolonialism and Built Heritage. Echoes of Empire in Asia, Africa and Europe, New York, Routledge, 2020, p. 106-123.

4 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1984-1992.

5 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empire”, in Martin Jay, Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds.), Empires of Vision. A Reader, Durham, Duke University Press, 2014, p. 1-22; Anna Grimshaw, Amanda Ravetz (eds.), Visualizing Anthropology, Bristol, Intellect, 2005; Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, 2, 2003, p. 5-32; Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader, London, Routledge, 1998.

6 The “protracted end” of the Italian presence in Africa with its social and cultural results, and its politics of memories has been deeply studied in the last decades: Silvana Patriarca, Il colore della Repubblica. «Figli della guerra» e razzismo nell’Italia postfascista, Turin, Einaudi, 2021; Claudio Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians, London, Palgrave Macmillan 2020; Antonio Morone, La fine del colonialismo italiano. Politica, società e memorie, Florence, Le Monnier, 2019; Valeria Deplano, Alessandro Pes (eds.) Quel che resta dell’Impero. La cultura coloniale degli italiani, Milan, Mimesis, 2014; Jacqueline Andall, Derek Duncan (eds.), Italian Colonialism. Legacy and Memory, Bern, Peter Lang, 2005.

7 Bernard S. Cohn, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism, and the Technologies of Power”, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1, 1988, p. 224-229.

8 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996.

9 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality”, Journal of Visual Culture, 5, 2006, p. 53-79.

10 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York-London, New York UP, 2006.

11 Adolfo Mignemi, Immagine coordinata per un impero. Etiopia 1935-1936, Turin, Forma, 1984.

12 Stephanie Malia Hom, “All empire is a stage...”, art. cited, p. 110.

13 Gianmarco Mancosu, “Amnesia, aphasia and amnesty: The articulations of Italian colonial memory in postwar films (1946–1960)”, Modern Italy, 26, 4, 2021, p. 387-408.

14 Maria Raffaella Pessolano, Assunta Bianco, Mariantonietta Picone, Le grandi esposizioni in Italia 1861-1911: la competizione culturale con l’Europa e la ricerca dello stile nazionale, Naples, Liguori, 1998.

15 On the circulation of exotic and orientalist discourses in Italy during early colonialism, see Giuseppe Finaldi, A History of Italian Colonialism 1860–1907, London, Routledge, 2017, p. 96-101.

16 Umberto Giglio, “Un centro di vita. Il museo coloniale”, Rassegna italiana del Mediterraneo, 40, 1924, p. 3-10.

17 Colonial sections and pavilions had already appeared in exhibitions in Turin in 1884, Palermo in 1892, Florence in 1903, Milan in 1906, again Turin in 1911.

18 Carlo Rossetti, “Origini del Museo dell’Africa Italiana”, Africa Italiana, 4, 1941, p. 13-16; La Mostra coloniale di Genova, Rome, Ministero delle Colonie-Tipografia Nazionale di G. Bertero & C, 1913.

19 S. Troilo, Pietre d’oltremare. Scavare, conservare, immaginare l’Impero (1899-1940), op. cit.; Andrea Giardina, André Vauchez, Il mito di Roma, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2016; Massimiliano Munzi, L’epica del ritorno. Archeologia e politica nella Tripolitana italiana, Rome, L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2001.

20 Carlo Rossetti, “Origini del Museo dell’Africa Italiana,” art. cited.

21 Beatrice Falcucci, “Visualizing colonial power: museum exhibitions and the promotion of imperialism in France, Belgium, and Italy,” art. cited.

22 Gabriele Proglio, Libia 1911-12. Immaginari coloniali e italianità, Florence, Le Monnier, 2016; Alessandro Triulzi, “La costruzione dell’immagine dell’Africa e degli africani nell’Italia coloniale”, in Alberto Burgio (ed.), Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870-1945, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1999, p. 165–81.

23 Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002.

24 Umberto Giglio, “Un centro di vita. Il museo coloniale”, art. cited.

25 Luigi Federzoni, Venti mesi di azione coloniale, Milan, Mondadori, 1926, p. 163.

26 Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (eds), Rereading Travellers to the East Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Post-unification Italy, Florence, FUP, 2022; Giuseppe Finaldi, “Culture and Imperialism in a “Backward” Nation? The Prima Guerra d’Africa (1885-96) in Italian Primary Schools”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8-3, 2003, p. 374-390.

27 Enrico Castelli, David Laurenzi (eds.), Permanenze e metamorfosi dell’immaginario coloniale in Italia, Naples, Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2000; Paolo Bertella Farnetti, Cecilia Dau Novelli (eds.), Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

28 David Arnold, “Europe, technology, and colonialism in the 20th century”, History and Technology, 21-1, 2005, p. 85-106; Daniel Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.

29 Simona Troilo, “Visions of the Empire. The Ruins of the Roman Past in Fascist Libya” Nuncius, 37, 2022, p. 615-642.

30 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. xxxv–liii. First published 1980 by Union générale d’édition.

31 An inventory in Maria Stella Margozzi (ed.), Viaggio in Africa. Dipinti e sculture delle collezioni del Museo Africano, Rome, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1999.

32 Lidio Cipriani in his book Dal capo al Cairo defined the Italians’ “innate talents”, namely the ability to triumph everywhere as explorers and conquerors: Lidio Cipriani, Dal Capo al Cairo, Florence, Bemporad, 1932, p. 628.

33 A list of the documents (mainly autographs like letters, diaries, manuscripts, but also rare editions of ancient books) that were housed in the Museum until May 1945 is to be found in Archivio storico diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASDMAE), Ministero dell’Africa Italiana (MAI), ex Ufficio Studi del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana (USMAI), b. 20, f. 119, to be compared with the inventory compiled by Filesi in the late 1980s. Cesira Filesi, L’archivio del Museo Africano in Roma. Presentazione inventari e documenti, Rome, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2001. See also: Beatrice Romiti, “Gli archivi confluiti nell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente: rilevazione e descrizione”, Nuovi annali della scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari, 28, 2014, p. 95-106.

34 Leopoldo Reck, “La missione italiana in Etiopia e la soluzione dei nuovi problemi”, Annali dell’Africa Italiana, 3-3, 1940, p. 137-148.

35 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997.

36 Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano, Impressioni di caccia in Somalia italiana, Rome, Alfieri e Lacroix, 1920; id, Alle sorgenti del Nilo Azzurro, Rome, Alfieri e Lacroix, 1922; id., Hic Sunt Leones, Rome, Anonima Libraria Italiana, 1924; id, Il sentiero delle belve: impressioni di caccia in Africa orientale, Milan, Mondadori, 1929; id., Fauna e caccia, Rome, Ministero delle colonie-Ufficio studi e propaganda, 1930; id., Cuoresaldo a caccia grossa. Avventure con animali selvatici, Turin, UTET, 1934.

37 The documentary films Hic Sunt Leones (1923), Il rifugio delle Plejadi (1926) and Il Sentiero delle Belve (1932).

38 Claudio Cerreti, La raccolta cartografica dell’Istituto Italo-Africano. Presentazione del fondo e guida alla consultazione, Rome, Istituto Italo-Africano, 1987.

39 Guglielmo Narducci, “Il Museo dell’Africa italiana”, L’Italia d’oltremare, 6-9, 1941, p. 140-141.

40 Silvana Palma, L’Africa nella collezione fotografica dell’IsIAO, Il fondo Eritrea-Etiopia, Rome-Naples, IsIAO-Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, 2005; Silvana Palma, “La fototeca dell’Istituto Italo Africano: appunti di un lavoro di riordino”, Africa. Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 44, 1989, p. 595-609; Silvana Palma, “Mirror with a memory? La confezione dell’immaginario coloniale”, in Paolo Bertella Farnetti, Adolfo Mignemi, Alessandro Triulzi (eds.), L’Impero nel cassetto. L’Italia coloniale tra album pubblici e archivi privati, Milan, Mimesis, 2013, p. 81-107.

41 For example, to provide entertainment and keep people’s spirits high on the so-called navi bianche, ships used for the transportations of civilians from the Horn of Africa to Italy during WWII, in ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19 “Museo Coloniale 1945-55”, f. 113, “Museo coloniale-cineteca. Cartella generale 1948-55”, s.f. 2, “Films cinematografici. Viaggio in Aoi (terza spedizione s.e. Caroselli)”, Note from Massimo Adolfo Vitale to USMAI, November 14, 1946.

42 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 5, “Films in carico al Museo coloniale”, “Elenchi dei film in carico al Museo Coloniale”, May 23, 1946, and July 3, 1946.

43 These two films are by Comerio Film. Luca Comerio was a famous photographer and filmmaker who worked in the first decades of the 20th century, becoming a pioneer of war reportage. Maria Assunta Pimpinelli, Marcello Seregni, “Il cielo nella guerra italo-turca: il caso Cines”, Immagine, 4, 2011, p. 31-68; Elena Degrada, Elena Mosconi, Silvia Paoli (eds.), Moltiplicare l’istante: Beltrami, Comerio e Pacchioni tra fotografia e cinema, Milan, Il Castoro, 2007.

44 Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM) 1934-36, b. 2046, f. 17/1 n. 3422, s.f. 34 “Costituzione del “Reparto Foto-cinematografico per l’Africa Orientale” dell’Istituto Nazionale Luce”, Letter from Alessandro Lessona, Undersecretary of the Minister of Colonies to Benito Mussolini, September 11, 1935; “Designazione del Dott. Umberto Giglio, direttore del Museo Coloniale, quale rappresentante dell’amministrazione coloniale in seno al Comitato tecnico per il nuovo Reparto fotocinematografico per l’Africa Orientale”.

45 For a detailed analysis of the different kind of films kept in the cineteca across its period of activity see Beatrice Falcucci, Gianmarco Mancosu, “Impero filmato, impero esibito. La cineteca del Museo Coloniale di Roma (1923-1951)”, Italia contemporanea, 229, 2022, p. 197-224.

46 L. Santomauro, “La nuova sede del Museo Coloniale a Villa Borghese”, L’Azione coloniale, November 24, 1932, p. 3.

47 As Ilaria Porciani noted, museums (especially war museums) “have had a powerful role in kindling the imagination of a nation consolidated by military efforts against the enemy, the “other””. Ilaria Porciani, “History Museums”, in Berber Bevernage, Nico Wouters (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 373-397.

48 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 21, “Miscellanea”, Note by prof. Carlo Conti Rossini, 1943.

49 James E. Cutting, “The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference”, in Paul Locher, Colin Martindale, Leonid Dorfman (eds), New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Psychology of Art, London, Taylor & Francis, 2006.

50 Guida Guido, Il Museo dell’Impero d’Italia, Bologna, Cappelli, 1941.

51 Following the attack on Italy’s High Command armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenseless residents of Addis Ababa for three days, eliminating 19-20 per cent of the capital’s population. See Ian Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.

52 For an analysis of the concept of martyrdom in colonial collections see Beatrice Falcucci, “Les “martyrs” dans les collections coloniales italiennes pendant le fascisme”, in Dominique Poulot (ed.), L’Effet musée. Objets, pratiques et cultures, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022, p. 107-128.

53 G.B., “Il Museo coloniale dell’Impero. I cimeli della guerra italo-africana”, L’Illustrazione italiana, 20-64, 1937, p. 545-546.

54 Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2011.

55 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 40, f. 1, “Sommario. L’azione culturale esplicata mediante mostre, esposizioni, musei”, June 15, 1960.

56 “Il museo coloniale, gioiello dell’Urbe”, L’Italia Coloniale, September 15, 1937, p. 137.

57 Silvia Cecchini, “Musei e mostre d’arte negli anni Trenta: l’Italia e la cooperazione intellettuale”, in Maria Ida Catalano (ed.), Snodi di critica. Musei, mostre, restauro e diagnostica artistica in Italia 1930-1940, Rome, Gangemi, 2014, p. 57-105.

58 Patrizia Dragoni, “Accessible à tous: la rivista “Mouseion” per la promozione del ruolo sociale dei musei negli anni ’30 del Novecento”, Il capitale culturale, 11, 2015, p. 149-221; Giovanni Pinna, “I musei nelle dittature: Germania, Italia, Spagna”, Nuova Museologia, 21, 2009, p. 2-33.

59 In 1932 the principal leader of the resistance in Libya, Omar al-Mukhtar, was captured and executed ending the so-called “pacification” operation in Libya.

60 Maddalena Carli, “L’Italia all’Exposition coloniale internationale et des pays d’outre-mer, Paris 1931”, Ricerche storiche, 1-2, 2015 p. 219-227.

61 Guide officiel de la section italienne à l’Exposition coloniale Paris 1931, Paris, De Rosa, 1931, p. 12-13.

62 Archives du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET), f.c, 2AM1C2, Letter from Henri-Paul Eydoux to Lieutenant d’Armagnac, January 10, 1934; MET, f.d, 2AM1A7, Entrées au Musée pendant le Sahara, 10 January 1934.

63 Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950, Ithaca-New York, Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 217.

64 MET, Guide Illustré Exposition du Sahara, 15 Mai–28 Oct 1934.

65 Corrado Zoli, “Il Sahara Italiano all’Esposizione del Trocadero di Parigi”, L’Illustrazione italiana, September 23, 1934.

66 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, Rome, Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati, 1934.

67 MET, f.a, 2AM1C2, Letter from Umberto Giglio to Georges Henri Rivière, January 27, 1934.

68 Francesco Corò, “L’esposizione internazionale del Sahara al Trocadéro di Parigi”, L’avvenire di Tripoli, June 28, 1934.

69 “Primati nostri: l’Esposizione del Sahara e il contributo italiano”, Il Popolo d’Italia, June 24, 1934.

70 Mario Dorato, “Italia e Sahara”, Oltremare, June 1934.

71 Alessandro Volterra, Maurizio Zinni, Il leone, il giudice e il capestro. Storia e immagini della repressione italiana in Cirenaica (1928-1932), Rome, Donzelli, 2021.

72 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, op. cit., p. 72-76.

73 Enrico De Agostini, Guida del Museo, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana, 1958, p. 18.

74 Le Sahara Italien. Guide Officiel de la Section Italienne, op. cit., p. 8-10.

75 Ottorino Centola, “Conferenza sahariana di S.E. Corrado Zoli”, Azione coloniale, June 14, 1934.

76 Reynold S. Salerno, “Britain, France and the Emerging Italian Threat, 1935-38”, in Martin S. Alexander, William J. Philpott (eds), Anglo-French Defence Relations between the Wars. Studies in Military and Strategic History, London, Palgrave, 2002, p. 72-91; Rosaria Quartararo, Roma tra Londra e Berlino: politica estera fascista dal 1930 al 1940, Rome, Bonacci, 1980.

77 MET, f.a. 2AM1C2, Letter from Umberto Giglio to Georges Henri Rivière, January 10, 1935.

78 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 21, f. 130, “Riapertura del Museo coloniale”, Letter from M.A Vitale to the Direzione del giardino zoologico and Ministero dell’Africa italiana, June 12, 1947.

79 Antonio M. Morone, “La fine del colonialismo italiano tra storia e memoria”, Storicamente, 12, 2016, p. 1-31.

80 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, “Restituzione all’Etiopia di oggetti asportati”, March 9, 1946.

81 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio Studi, b. 21, “Nota riservata”, September 27, 1948.

82 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio studi, b. 19, “Materiale archeologico e bibliografico proveniente dai Musei della Libia”, March 13, 1947.

83 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio studi, b. 19, “Materiale archeologico e bibliografico proveniente dai Musei della Libia”, September 4, 1946.

84 Simona Troilo, “Casta e bianca. La Venere di Cirene tra Italia e Libia (1913- 2008)”, Memoria e Ricerca, 1, 2018, p. 133-156.

85 Gianmarco Mancosu, “Risentimento coloniale. I “nemici” dell’Italia e la retorica sul ritorno in Africa (1946-1960)”, Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea: Odio e nemico nella storia, 45, 1, 2021, p. 1-28; Massimo Zaccaria, “Rimuovere o riscrivere il colonialismo? Il lavoro degli italiani in Africa”, in Antonio M. Morone (ed.), La fine del colonialismo italiano. Politica, società e memorie, Milan, Mondadori, 2018, p. 83-110; Alessandro Pes, “Il lavoro italiano in colonia nel dibattito politico tra il 1946 e il 1949”, Il Politico, 82-3, 2017, p. 160-175.

86 However, such diplomatic efforts brought to a result far below expectations. Italy only achieved a transitory period of UN Trusteeship administration on Somalia, the Amministrazione Fiduciaria dell’Italia in Somalia or AFIS (Italian Trusteeship of Somalia, 1950-60).

87 Vitale was an official of the Ministry of the Colonies and former prefect of Derna before his removal from his post in 1938 due to the racial laws. Vitale is usually remembered for organising research on Jewish deportees: Costantino Di Sante, Auschwitz prima di “Auschwitz”. Massimo Adolfo Vitale e le prime ricerche sugli ebrei deportati dall’Italia, Verona, Ombre Corte, 2014.

88 Il problema coloniale: Testimonianze della nostra civiltà in Africa, in La Settimana Incom, 00192, 24/09/1948.

89 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 948, “Museo Coloniale Settimana Incom”, Letter from Massimo Adolfo Vitale to Ufficio Studi del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana and Direzione Generale degli Affari Politici e Studi del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, September 25, 1948.

90 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s. f. 948, “Museo Coloniale Settimana Incom”, Letter from M.M. Moreno to M.A. Vitale, December 22, 1947.

91 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, “Museo Coloniale 1945-55”, f. 113, “Museo coloniale-cineteca. Cartella generale 1948-55”, sf. 4/3, “Museo Coloniale Settimana Incom”, Letter from the cabinet of De Gasperi (MAI) to the director of the Museo dell’Africa Italiana Massimo Adolfo Vitale, October 7, 1948.

92 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 5, “Films in carico al Museo coloniale”, “Elenchi dei film in carico al Museo Coloniale”, May 23, 1946, and July 3, 1946.

93 ASDMAE, USMAI, b. 19, f. 113, s.f. 1, “Museo Coloniale. Ricognizione Films-Deposito films presso Cinecittà-Assicurazione films”, Handwritten notes by Martino Mario Moreno, June 10, 1947.

94 ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio Studi, b. 21, “Oggetti di valore storico richiesti dal governo libico”, March 7, 1955; ASDMAE, USMAI, Ufficio Studi, b. 21, Nota, March 9, 1955.

95 In fact, the episode, although only 15 minutes long, is rich in facets and content, such as an interview with an Italian bersagliere who left children behind in Ethiopia, and Araya’s complaints about the roles she is assigned to by Italian directors, which always tend to involve nudity.

96 Felice Liperi, Faccette nere. Inni e canzoni all’origine del razzismo italiano, Rome, manifestolibri, 2022.

97 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia. Race and Disabled Histories in France”, Public Culture, 23-1, 2011, p. 121-156. For the Italian case see Gianmarco Mancosu, “Amnesia, aphasia and amnesty: The articulations of Italian colonial memory in postwar films (1946-1960)”, art. cited.

98 For a more detailed analysis of the 2020 press-conference see Beatrice Falcucci, “Il Museo Coloniale di Roma tra propaganda imperiale, oblio e riallestimento”, Passato e Presente, 112, 2021, p. 83-99.

99 Ilaria Alpi (1961-1994) was an Italian journalist killed in Mogadishu. At the time of her murder, she was following a case of weapon and illegal toxic waste traffic in which she believed also the Italian Army and other institutions were involved.

100 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4obZIAecsw

101 https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/2020/06/17/white-tinted-glasses-on-the-difficult-heritage-of-italian-colonialism-journal-of-visual-culture-hafi-31-2/

102 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwnat4ABrY8

103 https://www.senato.it/leg/18/BGT/Schede/FascicoloSchedeDDL/ebook/55169.pdf

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Beatrice Falcucci, « A repository of colonial intervisuality and memory: the Colonial Museum in Rome »Revue d’histoire culturelle [En ligne], 6 | 2023, mis en ligne le 28 juillet 2023, consulté le 14 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/5651 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rhc.5651

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Beatrice Falcucci

Beatrice Falcucci est chercheuse à l’université de L’Aquila et fellow de l’Institut royal néerlandais de Rome. Elle a soutenu son doctorat à l’université de Florence et a été post-doctorante à l’American Academy de Rome et à la Fondazione Einaudi de Turin. Ses recherches portent sur la construction de l’identité italienne au cours du XIXe et du XXe siècle, sur le colonialisme italien et sur la période post-coloniale, ainsi que sur la muséologie coloniale. beatrice.falcucci@univaq.it

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