Museum of Civilizations Doesn’t Shy Away from the Horrors Committed During Italian Colonial Rule

At the entrance to the sprawling Palazzo delle Scienze in Rome, home to the bulk of the collection of the Museum of Civilisations, is የካቲት ፲፪ -Yekatit 12 (2022), a multi-media work by the Italian-Ethiopian-Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, featuring grainy black and white clips of Italian fascist propaganda projected above a sculpture of a stairway topped by a regal lion. In one of the images, we see a wounded man in shirt and tie, proudly showing off his injuries. This is Rodolfo Graziani, Viceroy of Italian East Africa – a man so notorious for his brutality during the Italo-Senussi war in Libya that he was nicknamed ‘the butcher of Fezzan’.

If, like me, you were raised in Italy, chances are you might not know who Graziani is or that an attempt on his life was the catalyst for one of the deadliest chapters in Ethiopian history, in which an estimated 19,000–30,000 Ethiopians were killed by Italian occupying forces and paramilitaries in a three-day massacre known as Yekatit 12. Instead, you will likely have been fed a heavy diet of the myth of italiani brava gente (good people), an insidiously earnest narrative that absolves Italians from horrors committed during their colonial rule, instead portraying them as an innocuous and benign presence in occupied territories, reluctant and unequal partners of Nazi Germany.

Italy’s collective amnesia, sanctioned by the 1946 Togliatti amnesty and endorsed by the Allies, is one of a number of thorny issues the state-owned Museum of Civilisations is tackling head-on under the directorship of contemporary art curator Andrea Viliani. Now two years into his four-year contract – which, crucially, predates the current, Giorgia Meloni-led, far-right government, intent on whitewashing Italy’s fascist past – Viliani is deep in the process of implementing a programme based on what he calls ‘progressive radical revision’, which questions the museum’s institutional history and ideology, ultimately seeking to decolonize its vast collection of more than two million artefacts and documents.

This is no easy task: the Museum of Civilisations is the result of a 2016–17 merger of six state-owned collections, including the former Colonial Museum inaugurated by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1923, which had been closed to the public since 1971. Its planned reopening sparked controversy in 2020, with many postcolonial researchers sceptical that those behind the plans possessed the expertise to sympathetically exhibit the collection’s deeply problematic items, including a series of notorious 1930s plaster casts taken of living people in East Africa (and elsewhere) to prove their ‘racial inferiority’. Viliani’s ethical, comprehensive and critical overhaul of the collection has dispelled much of that unease, although some people I spoke to for this piece, including Lucrezia Cippitelli, a lecturer in postcolonial theory at Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, question the notion of Western institutions being decolonized by white European curators. ‘I think a huge museum like this needs a lot of resources [to achieve this successfully], particularly specialists in each field who have developed a solid [institutional] background at an international level.’

The collection of Mussolini’s propaganda museum reveals much about how Italy has addressed its violent, colonialist legacy – namely through erasure. ‘What is extraordinary about the former Colonial Museum,’ Viliani explains, ‘is that we are faced with 50 years during which the museum wasn’t merely closed but also actively dispersed. It’s a textbook removal of knowledge and conscience.’ The team is working at unearthing and piecing together the displaced archives, with plans for the collection to be re-exhibited in 2026. In the meantime, the Museo delle Opacità (Museum of Opacities), which Viliani calls ‘an embassy for the museum to come’, was inaugurated in June 2023. It includes a number of new commissions of contemporary artworks, which will enter the museum’s collection to act as ‘critical lights’ to counterbalance the colonial archives. It’s an astute, forward-thinking strategy: works that are acquired remain in a state collection forever. ‘The next artistic director will have to work with what is there,’ says Matteo Lucchetti, Head of Contemporary Arts and Programs. Unsurprisingly, much speculation swirls around the longevity of Viliani’s tenure. Few I spoke to believe it would be renewed by a government intent on promoting right-wing cultural figures, many of whom have questionable qualifications, to the country’s top leadership roles across the culture sector.

Museo delle Opacità is a veritable living laboratory, where researchers and experts work alongside artists, curators such as Johanne Affricot, and cultural associations like Tezeta, which tackles the decolonizing of public spaces in Rome, or QuestaèRoma, a group that fights systemic racism in Italy, in an open exchange of ideas, activities and events to probe and reframe the collections and archives. One such intervention is the exhibition side by side of two virtually identical cups used for making injera, the Eritrean-Ethiopian staple flatbread. With one cup belonging to the museum and the other to the grandmother of a Tezeta member, this display highlights how such objects have been extracted from their intimate, quotidian settings and exoticized in European museum vitrines.

Another highly effective example of this re-presentation of the collection can be found on the top floor of the Museum of Opacities. Searching for Appendices to Truths Lost: The Broken Sunglasses of Omar al-Mukhtar (2023), an installation by Egyptian artist Malak Yacout, centres on a pair of sunglasses belonging to Omar al-Mukhtar, leader of the Libyan anticolonialist resistance. Taken by Graziani during the interrogation that led to al-Mukhtar’s execution in 1931, the sunglasses were brought to Italy as a war trophy and displayed in the Colonial Museum. By tracking down the descendants of the optician who made the glasses, and by analyzing recordings of the resistance fighter’s son, Yacout ‘gives back a historic truth to al-Mukhtar’, says Lucchetti.

The response to these interventions has largely been enthusiastic, not only in the art world but also in a burgeoning new audience that is beginning to feel represented by the museum. Artist Adelita Husni-Bey, who is Italian-Libyan, and who has a piece in the collection, is now in the second year of running what was originally intended as a one-off workshop titled La collezione in tumulto (Collection in Turmoil, which invites the museum’s researchers and visitors to look at the collections from the former Colonial Museum and critically reflect on the institution’s hidden histories. The workshop has been a success, seeing widespread internal and external participation, so much so that the museum intends to establish a permanent laboratory. ‘There is really a lot of openness from the museum in seeing how these communities want to engage; it’s really fostered from the top,’ says Husni-Bey. ‘I don’t know any other museum in Italy that has thought so critically about what it means to display these pieces.’

Schoolchildren have always and still do make up the bulk of the museum’s audience. When I visited, I saw a number of students on group visits. It was moving to see a whole new generation being given the critical tools necessary to read Europe’s complicated ethnographic collections. ‘This is not an easy story to tell,’ Viliani tells me. ‘It’s important that we’re creating a community around this debate, which will grow because we need time to explain that we’re not just adding contemporary art nor simply rehanging the collections. We’re trying to explain that this museum is a place which mediates complex thoughts and recounts an international history but also, and above all, an Italian history. You come here to understand what Italy is, what Italy was and what it wants to be.’

‘Museo delle Opacità’ (Museum of Opacities) co-curated by the museum officers Gaia Delpino and Rossana Di Lella, together with Matteo Lucchetti is currently on view at Museo delle Civiltà di Roma, Italy

^{Main image: ‘Museo delle Opacità’ (Museum of Opacities ) (detail), 2024, installation view. Courtesy: Museo delle Civiltà di Roma; photograph: Giorgio Benni}