The question how European societies are dealing with the legacies of their colonial pasts are currently increasingly attracting both public and scientific attention. For some reason, Italy’s public is hardly concerned by this international discussion. Scholars, however, have begun to address the heritage of Italian colonialism almost 20 years ago. Even though this research covered colonial heritage in a very broad context, it failed to address a key dimension: the material traces, such as architecture, arts, objects in museums, monuments, street names etc. In the context of Italy’s past such artefacts became objects of scientific research only recently and only in the context of the fascist regime’s legacy in Italy. However, the colonial material traces of both the fascist and the liberal era have not been addressed yet. Italy’s colonial memory is still dominated by silence, denial, suppression, and various myths. While the Italian empire has almost been forgotten by most people today, it left - even though it was relatively small and short-lived compared to other European colonial empires - a lot of material and cultural traces throughout Italy as well as its former colonies.

This workshop intends to expand the knowledge about the material world of Italian colonialism and the materiality of its post-colonial memory. Furthermore, it will be examined how that ‘stuff’ left behind by the colonial epoch offers a new understanding of colonialism and its aftermath in both Italy and its ex-colonies. Therefore, the workshop aims at bringing together excellent scholars, who already made outstanding contributions to this new and innovative research field. The invited papers will challenge Italy’s postcolonial silence by examining its displaced institutional and public memory from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective - including history, anthropology, literature, memory studies, media studies, architecture, art history, and public history.

Already confirmed talks are going to address material legacies of colonialism within as well as outside the former metropole. Thus, colonial traces of various forms such as architecture, arts, museums, monuments or toponymy will be tracked in the empire’s peripheries. Therefore, case studies will not only deal with Rome but also with Bolzano, Sicily, and the Dodecanese Islands as well as with travelling materials such as artistic objects.

This Workshop is generously supported by the Istituto Storico Austriaco in Rome, the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, and the Society of Italian Studies.