The Museum of Opacity and the Dark Pages of Italian Colonialism

The history of Italian colonialism is like an indigestible morsel, neither swallowed nor eaten. This is what I thought—to paraphrase the opinion of Alessandro Triulzi, historian of Africa—as I descended the stairs of the beautiful Palazzo delle Scienze, in Rome's EUR district, after seeing " Museo delle Opacità #2. Agriculture and Colonial Architecture ." I have a long-standing interest in the history of colonial societies, and I had gone with great curiosity to see the partial reorganization of the collections of a museum that disappeared over fifty years ago, the former Museum of Italian Africa. I left feeling very perplexed after seeing two evocative installations and a short educational tour, rigorous but rather sparse and difficult to read.

The Museum of Italian Africa —old photographs attest— was pure propaganda . Commissioned in 1935 by Mussolini himself, with the ambition of celebrating the Empire, including the collections assembled since 1914, after the Libyan invasion, the museum was closed in 1971, sealing its twelve thousand pieces in crates that were never reopened for nearly half a century. Now on display is a second stage of the progressive reclassification of the objects, underway since 2017, curated by Rosa Anna Di Lella, Gaia Del Pino, and Matteo Lucchetti. This work is aimed at the creation of the Museum of Opacity, which will see the light of day within the framework of the Muciv, directed by Andrea Villani.

The Muciv is the Museum of Civilizations, a gigantic, pharaonic project that brings together under one roof Luigi Pigorini's prehistoric and ethnographic collections, those of the former Royal Geological Museum, Oriental art, African art, art from the Americas and Oceania; art from the Early Middle Ages, popular arts and traditions... Two million pieces and a monumental effort to reinterpret and relocate everything in a sort of museum of museums. An idea that requires not only great expertise, but also courage and creative insight to sustain itself.

The Museum of Opacity is supposed to open next year, but who knows? And this is the second time the redesign has been shared with the public . Among the new installations, I admired the terracotta amphorae containing the ashes from the ritual burning of the skeleton of a building belonging to the former Colonization Agency of the Sicilian estate. An evocative idea, though a bit of a struggle to explain: if I understood correctly, this installation was created by burning a replica of another, which itself reproduced a colonial structure. It's called "Decolonization Agency: Ashes," and the remains of the combustion are collected in African terracotta molds to symbolically "fertilize" other projects. The work is by DAAR, an art project by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, winners of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Here, the intention is to use the incursions of contemporary artists to regenerate stories by changing their meaning, or to restore depth to materials that were uprooted from their contexts and used for propaganda in colonial museums . The perplexity arises from the fact that the starting point—Italian colonial history, already little-known and even falsified—remains unclear. It's difficult to decolonize our way of thinking without turning to colonial history, decoding and deconstructing what we can't see. Paradoxically, we end up producing an elusive communication, the exorcism of a evoked evil. Regenerating by releasing hidden meanings is a great ambition, and someone must dare to cultivate it, but here the supporting memory appears weak. As if the starting material were so embarrassing that it couldn't be shown as it was. And we need to know, not erase.

In the Museum of Opacity, Opacity stands for amnesia, but it also alludes to Opacity as a right, as the need to share cultural identities without classifying them, according to a concept by the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant. It is to be hoped that the exhibition will become clearer as the work progresses, because what we see so far appears truly opaque, and not in the desired sense. Moreover, we can now draw on a flourishing historical and literary research, which has produced a wealth of material in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Ninety years after the start of the Ethiopian war (1935) , which closed the cycle of Italian conquests in overseas lands that began in 1892 with the acquisition of the Bay of Assab, useful for scaling the highlands of the Horn of Africa, the black hole of the twentieth century – the century of denial and repression – is illuminated by an exceptional number of studies and works that revisit the forgotten past. This is what is new today: why continue to focus everything on amnesia? And if this is not enough, another example is that in the last ten years, among the dozen candidates for the Strega Prize – that is, in the mainstream of Italian fiction – there have been novels that compose a prism of new stories on our brief colonial past: “ Sangue giusto ” by Francesca Melandri (2017), “ Cassandra a Mogadiscio ” by Igiaba Scego (2023) and this year “ La signora Meraviglia ” by Saba Anglana (2025).

Publisher Franco Angeli recently published an impressive bibliographical catalogue, a nearly two hundred and fifty-page map of research conducted between 2000 and 2024. Entitled "Historical Studies on Italian Colonialism. Bibliography 2000-2024," it is written by Nicola Labanca, a professor at the University of Siena and one of the leading historians of the field, a field he has been working on for over thirty years. He has published a dozen books, from "In marcia verso Adua" (Einaudi 1993) to "Oltremare: Storia dell'ampia coloniale italiana," recently returned to bookstores from Mulino in an updated edition. Introducing Angeli's new geography of studies, Professor Labanca immediately notes that the compass by which we navigate this territory has changed in the new century, and that the existing works are not only numerous, but also in tune with or in dialogue with major international historiographical innovations. In his introductory essay he analyzes what is there and what is missing, reasons for interest and critical observations.

In short, the history of Italian colonialism, once so neglected that the revision of the fascist-derived narrative began only twenty years after the end of the war, can truly no longer be considered the taboo it was in the last century. Back then, it was a matter for lone rangers.

Like Angelo Del Boca, who from a prominent correspondent for Gazzetta del Popolo and then Italo Pietra's Giorno, became a field scholar of colonial history. Traveling to Africa and drawing on new sources, Del Boca uncovered a reality far different from what was then being reported in Italy. Or like Giorgio Rochat, a military historian and professor at the University of Turin, who, poring through archives that were then difficult to access (they were still managed by former colonial officials with little interest in transparency), uncovered the first traces of the unspeakable. The atrocities committed in Libya and Ethiopia, the massive use of toxic gases, banned by international conventions and used against civilian populations.

Angelo Del Boca, author of the six-volume history of Italians in East Africa and Libya, published by Laterza between 1976 and 1988, carried out a monumental research project and stubbornly defended it against the denialism that was prevalent at the time. He countered the sugarcoated narrative of a brash and "gentle" colonialism; he debunked the myth of "Italians as good people," fighting for Italy to acknowledge its responsibilities. Yes, in 1937, after a failed assassination attempt on his life, the Viceroy of Ethiopia, Rodolfo Graziani, had given free rein to indiscriminate reprisals against the population of Addis Ababa (approximately 19,000 victims). Using the attack, the Ethiopian aristocracy was deported, the fortune tellers who predicted Italy's defeat were executed, and the entire elite of the Monophysite Christian Church was executed, including the professors of the theological school in the monastery city of Debre Libanos, where the attackers were said to have taken refuge. Yes, to crush resistance against the occupiers—Ethiopia was never truly subjugated—gas was used, entire villages were exterminated, and the air and water were poisoned, resulting in starvation. Sixty tons of mustard gas rained down on the plateau from the sky. Yes, the "racial protection" laws were designed for the colonies and came into force in 1937, a year before those passed in Italy against the Jews. They prohibited and criminalized mixed marriages and madamato (relationships more uxorio with a “madama”, the lexicon says almost everything) so that Italians would not fraternize and lose awareness of their own superiority.

Angelo Del Boca died in 2021. Anyone wishing to gain an idea of his rugged courage can find him interviewed in "Inconscio italiano," the documentary made by Luca Guadagnino in 2011. A new edition of his autobiographical writings, "Il mio Novecento," has just been released by Neri Pozza. Del Boca had an adversary of the same caliber: Indro Montanelli, who had volunteered for East Africa in May 1935, when the Ethiopian campaign was already decided, and who stubbornly denied the use of gas. He was there and could testify that it was not true.

The dispute between Montanelli and Del Boca over the use of gas in Ethiopia is historic. Gentlemen of another era, they had no doubts about each other's good faith.

This continued until 1996, when—after sixty years—General Domenico Corcione, Defense Minister of the technical government led by Lamberto Dini, produced the documents and made a public admission of the use of gas, ending a long-standing dispute. Two years later, during a state visit to Ethiopia, President Scalfaro admitted responsibility and apologized on behalf of Italy. Just as the German authorities later did for the Nazi massacres in our country.

Montanelli admitted he was wrong; and Del Boca explained that Indro couldn't have had a direct memory of it because he was hospitalized in Asmara at the time of the mustard gas drops. They were gentlemen of another era: they had fought each other violently, head-on, never doubting each other's good faith. After Montanelli's death, Del Boca edited the new edition of "XX Eritrean Battalion," featuring previously unpublished letters written by Indro to his family while on the Ethiopian front (Rizzoli published them in 2010). He hid nothing, neither his fourteen-year-old indigenous wife, bought and resold, nor the young Montanelli's exaltation: "We must create the legend of the Colony and its war, no realism, no De Amicis, no Galvano," he wrote to his parents. "Today, more than ever, I am convinced that we must leave the sad Italy of pleasant literature to its fate. The men of this land must become giants (...) Here there is space and opportunity for fifteen or twenty million Italians who will find more hardship, but also more satisfaction, than in Via Tornabuoni and similar alleys. The colonials (and by this I mean not just the soldiers) will be the country's new aristocracy."

They weren't, but that was the spirit of the times. It was deflated with their novels by two writers of great stature, who had witnessed the wars in Africa with their own eyes. Ennio Flaiano, a veteran of Ethiopia, recounted the melancholy sloth of the soldier sent to kill "without his knowledge," frightened by sexually transmitted infections and other threatening plagues. Mario Tobino, a former medical officer, described the ever-present madness in his "The Libyan Desert." With "Time to Kill," Flaiano won the Strega Prize in 1947, and perhaps the specter of that lost and cowardly soldier still haunts our unconscious, but now he is merely a great literary progenitor.

Among twentieth-century Italian writers, at least two owe their cosmopolitan profile to overseas societies. Both are originally from Trieste: Fausta Cialente, who lived in Egypt—in Alexandria—in the 1930s and 1940s, author of a series of Levantine novels, including the beautiful "Cortile a Cleopatra"; and Gianfranco Calligarich, born in Asmara in 1939, author of "La melanconia dei Crusich," the story of a family of travelers who landed in Abyssinia during the Empire; and a novel about the life of Vittorio Bottego, the Italian explorer who sought to emulate Henry Morton Stanley.

Over the past thirty years, works on the Italian colonial experience have multiplied: from the Eritrean youth of Erminia Dell'Oro, a reclusive writer discovered by Piero Gelli, to the historical novels of Carlo Lucarelli, Davide Longo, and Wu Ming 2. The forgotten passages of many Italian families in Africa have also surfaced: from Luciana Capretti's Libya in "Ghibli" to the Eritrean adventure of a woman of great temperament in Giulia Caminito's "La grande A." And then there are literary investigations like Tommaso Giartosio's in Eritrea, the memoirs of Somali and Ethiopian partisans, the version of the Askaris, and biographies. Laterza has just published Ilio Barontini's, written by Marco Ferrari. Barontini was the legendary anti-fascist who went to Ethiopia to train partisans, organizing a provisional government of patriots recognized by the Emperor in exile. It is impossible to mention everything (even the writer has put a stone in this jagged mosaic), but certainly a cycle has ended and today the ones rewriting history, even in our language, are the children and grandchildren of those who lived it on the other side.

Saba Anglana is an Italian-Somali artist—a singer, actress, and writer—and in her novel, "La signora Meraviglia," published by Sellerio and nominated for the Strega Prize, she recounts the adventures of an aunt who has lived among us for forty years and is pursuing the wonderful goal of citizenship. It's a bumpy, paradoxical, even hilarious journey, on a potholed road, which awakens the presence of a magical figure at the roots of the family tree: an Ethiopian girl who runs, desperately running to avoid being caught by the soldier pursuing her.

If we speak of the unconscious, it's no longer just our own that's at stake: it's not just the Italian soldier, who went to war dressed in propaganda and destined to confront a brutal reality; now the other half of the story is also among us, that of the Ethiopian girl seized and cruelly exploited. The jirro of the Somali diaspora lives among us, the catastrophic trauma of the war so beautifully captured by Igiaba Scego in "Cassandra in Mogadishu." One of the finest novels of this kind about the war in Ethiopia is by Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian-born American author who has long worked in Italy on photographic memory and, in Ethiopia, on oral sources. Her book, "The Shadow King," a finalist for the 2020 International Booker Prize and translated by Anna Nadotti for Einaudi, recounts the resistance. We knew that Ethiopia was never truly subjugated and that many atrocities were committed to counter the guerrilla warfare, we did not know that there were women fighters, partisans who challenged the occupiers (and the patriarchal yoke) for freedom.

Realigning the imagery and conceptual categories with which we view the history of colonialism is not easy, but we can do it. We are no longer stuck in lies or amnesia. So let's return to the original question: does it still make sense to dwell on flawed memory? Why not reposition ourselves, drawing on the rich research and narratives of the last 25 years? I asked Professor Nicola Labanca, who mapped 21st-century studies on Italian colonialism and who—among other things—has just received the Feltrinelli Prize for Contemporary History from the Accademia dei Lincei.

"I would immediately distinguish two levels," says Professor Labanca. "That of historical studies, which are important but have limited impact, and that of common sense. Colonialism has always remained submerged in the consciousness of Italians, a repressed thought in the psychoanalytic sense because it was never discussed. Until the mid-1960s, there wasn't even any independent research, and the memory only surfaced at certain specific moments: on the thirtieth anniversary of the Ethiopian war, at the time of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movements, and then in the 1990s with the famous controversies between Montanelli and Del Boca."

In the introductory essay to the extraordinary bibliography published by Franco Angeli, you discuss new, vigorous studies with a postcolonial and decolonial perspective, but you point out a significant fragmentation of research and a lack of synthesis. I went to a preview of the Museo delle Opacità in Rome and came away perplexed. The dissemination promoted by cultural and political institutions, not to be confused with historical research or the common sense of Italians, is a further level. Italians should learn something from the institutions. The reality is that the silence of fifty years ago is fortunately no longer there; it has been filled by the activity of multiple actors who move in an effervescent, but sometimes disjointed and confused, manner: those who work in museums don't know what historians do, who in turn know little about the work of anthropologists, and vice versa. This does not detract from the fact that some contributions are truly original and significant: I think of African studies, once reticent, if not conniving—just remember Carlo Giglio and his Committee for Italy's work in Africa. Today there is a new generation of Africanists in their thirties and forties who know African languages and know how to conduct field research. There are also virtuous examples like the Historical War Museum in Rovereto, which is compiling a catalogue of colonial objects and collections present in Trentino. And there we begin to understand how relations with overseas countries were rooted in Italian territory".

In the new edition of your book "Oltremare," you write that colonialism is the story of a relationship born from the impact between colonizers and colonized. There was no single protagonist, and it is from integrating two different historical perspectives that we can learn something new. However, I don't think this method is widely practiced: with regard to Italian colonialism, the need to demolish the self-absolution of the past still prevails.

"Criticizing myths," Professor Labanca continues, "is healthy and beneficial. Some new studies have focused on this, but it shouldn't obscure the search for a comprehensive and comprehensive view of the dynamics of the other's history. Let's take an example: not all Africans resisted the conquest; there were also accomplices and collaborators. Some historians of the past, such as Angelo Del Boca and Roberto Battaglia, tried to recount this to the best of their ability. Some of the best Africanists of the following generation, such as Anna Maria Gentili, Alessandro Triulzi, and Giampaolo Calche Novati, then focused on colonialism from Africa's perspective. In the case of Italian colonial rule, however, the intertwining of two distinct historical events has not been consciously pursued, and a comprehensive view has not yet been fully developed."

You also say that the colonial substratum we've internalized, and which has entered our culture, today counts less than the legacy of globalization, so much so that Italians are more racist today than they were yesterday. What does this mean?

Colonialism is a half-thousand-year-old chapter in European history, spanning the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Until the nineteenth century, Italy participated only indirectly, and Italians harbored more or less the same prejudices toward Africans as the English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. But these were cultural prejudices, not based on the defense of economic interests, which were weaker. Since 1882, when Italy began to establish direct colonial rule, things have changed, and racist stereotypes born of direct experience have formed. After that chapter ended, with decolonization in the 1960s, Italians have continued to be racist, but the four centuries in which we culturally shared perceptions and impulses similar to those of other European countries weigh no less heavily than our brief history of direct colonial rule. Globalization and large-scale migration have affected this substratum. Today, it would be naive to say that Italians don't want to shorten the time it takes to grant citizenship to immigrants. immigrants because of their colonial past. If they vote no in the referendum, it's for a combination of centuries-old historical reasons, which have been infiltrated by new phenomena. Always returning solely to colonialism overshadows international dynamics and inter-ethnic power relations today, which matter much more.

Some of the new studies on Italian colonialism emphasize the idea that Italy, with its fragile and incomplete national identity, managed to achieve it thanks to colonial wars. And so, for this reason, it's difficult to distance oneself from that historical experience. But you don't seem entirely convinced. Why?

During the colonial period, the Italian state, first liberal and then fascist, emphasized this through propaganda because it believed it helped strengthen the nation. But after 1943, all this disappeared, while in European states with overseas territories, it continued even after the end of World War II. So, be careful to emphasize the impact of the colonial experience on the construction of the Italian nation. I greatly appreciate these new studies and recognize the value of their contribution, but I also value accuracy: and the influence of the propaganda of the time cannot be overestimated, when the colonialists themselves were deeply dissatisfied with the Italians' colonial consciousness.

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