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ROME (AP) — For decades, Italy has worked to restore ancient Roman-era statues, Etruscan vases and other treasures looted from its lands and sold to museums around the world. Now, the country is coming to terms with the fact that it, too, has stolen its museum collections: remnants of a brutal colonial empire in North Africa, but it hasn’t given it enough thought.
For more than a year, a team of museum directors, university researchers and academics has been conducting a “census” of the collections of 498 Italian national museums to see exactly what they contain. The aim is to provide government authorities with preliminary data on the weapons, artifacts and ceremonial objects that Italian museums may hold, in response to a movement for restitution requests that will only increase in the general reckoning with the legacy of European colonial empires and the associated racial justice.
The survey comes amid a sea change in how museums and governments in Europe and the Americas return artefacts to their countries and communities of origin. These museums believe that they can no longer hold objects in good conscience if they were acquired as a result of historical violence, colonial occupation, looting or war.
Even the Vatican has joined the repatriation bandwagon, recently returning to Greece three fragments of the Parthenon marble it had held for two centuries. “First, there is the seventh commandment: If you steal, you have to give it back,” explained Pope Francis.
The Italian audit began under the previous government and continues under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers Italy party originated from dictator Benito Mussoli’s The neo-fascist successor party. Mussolini’s fascist regime was most closely associated with Italy’s North African colonies, which included Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, and Somalia, as well as a protectorate in Albania. The empire began in the late 19th century, but Mussolini tried to expand it, but was forced to abandon it after World War II, and the last Italian rule over Somalia ended in 1960.
“Even though our colonial history is shorter than that of Britain, Germany, France or Belgium, we clearly cannot underestimate the problem,” said Massimo Osanna, the culture ministry official in charge of the museum, in a recent speech on the issue of restitution. said at the meeting. “We have to rethink collections, rethink institutions, rethink transparency of narrative, and return on a case-by-case basis.”
Osanna has appointed a team of museum directors and academics, led by Christian Greco, director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, to carry out the audit. The committee has recruited a dozen graduate students who are helping curators examine their vaults and archives to see what’s out there.
In an interview, Greco acknowledged that the issue of restitution and Italy’s colonial past remains sensitive. He said he had expected resistance when his team sent out a questionnaire asking whether museums held items that might have been acquired in ways that would be considered immoral today.
“I thought people would be scared, but instead, people are very excited that this is happening,” he said, adding that 30 museums with large collections had already responded. The aim is to present a report to the Ministry of Culture by mid-year and then organize an international seminar to discuss the findings in the second half of the year.
“Objects don’t necessarily tell us about the past, they tell us a lot about us,” Greco said. “When I look at ancient Egyptian objects, are they telling me something about ancient Egyptian civilization, or are they telling me something more about Eurocentrism?”
It seems appropriate that Italy embrace the experiments of its colonial past, including the recent restitution conference, in the Museum of Civilization, one of the vast travertine blocks of fascist buildings in Mussolini’s utopian EUR neighborhood in southern Rome.
A marvel in itself, the museum was renamed in 2016 to include a compendium of two million objects from six old collections: the Colonial Museum, the Museum of Oriental Art, the Museum of Medieval Art, the Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, and the Museum of Traditional Popular Arts.
The most problematic of these is the 12,000-piece collection of the Colonial Museum, which Mussolini himself inaugurated in 1923. The museum originally consisted of trophies sent home by Italian officers stationed in North Africa, the purpose was not to educate Italians about African culture, but to show people at home the greatness of Italy’s military conquests abroad and how they helped provide raw materials for Italian industry .
“It’s propaganda, purely a propaganda museum to create a sense of colonialism among tourists,” said curator Rosa Anna Di Lella.
The museum’s storage rooms are filled with busts of bearded Italian military heroes. Libyan cotton specimens, Eritrean sunflower seeds, Somali beans; and plaster masks made on living people are relics of ethnotypological anthropological studies that are so controversial today that they are not on display.
It is here that Andrea Viliani, director of the Museum of Civilization, embarks on a radical rethinking of the museum, its problematic collections and the narrative of Italy’s colonial past, beginning with a preliminary exhibition that opened in June.
As well as a section on the return, the exhibition will also include two giant murals stolen from the Ethiopian parliament by Italian troops. Also on display is a painting depicting the Battle of Adva, the decisive battle in the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1896 that (temporarily) halted the advance of the Kingdom of Italy in North Africa.
Most Italian-made combat renditions depict defeated Italian “martyrs”. The work on display, painted by an Ethiopian artist, celebrates Ethiopia’s victory over European empires carving up the continent, which became the epitome of Pan-African independence.
Villani says it’s time for ethnographic museums like his to tell history differently, giving voice to those whose stories haven’t been told. Italy was a bit behind other European countries but could play a unique role because it was both the perpetrator and the victim of robberies, he said.
“We’re at the beginning, and that beginning still happens to be … testing the ground and finding the language,” he said. “This is a journey that needs more chapters, and we don’t know how it will end.”
The issue of restitution is not entirely new to Italy: it pioneered the legal framework for bringing home thousands of artifacts stolen from its lands by unscrupulous “tombaroli,” or tomb robbers, in recent decades. It has won back so much loot that it recently opened the Museum of Scrap Art, where returned items stay in Rome for a while before being shipped back to the area where it was stolen.
Over the years, Italy has returned numerous Holocaust-era and other stolen trophies — and just this week, four returned items were unveiled in Egypt. It has also made two notable handovers of its colonial past: In 2005, Italy returned to Ethiopia the colossal 160-ton obelisk of Axum, a monument to Mussolini’s 1937 occupation of Ethiopia by his troops. Then ordered to send it to Rome. In 2008, then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi handed over the Venus of Cyrene to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi , an ancient Roman statue captured by Italian troops in 1913.
The statue reportedly disappeared amid the turmoil that engulfed Libya after Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, a move for those who insist that when artifacts are safely housed in European museums, they can be seen by millions, even if deprived of them The cultural context in which human nature better serves the restitution critics provides fodder.
Oxford archaeologist Dan Hicks, who spearheaded the campaign to return Benin bronzes and other artefacts, said the “keep and explain” talk was nonsense and that Italy was right to join other European museums in returning the loot of.
Hicks, who spoke alongside Ossana at the restitution conference, argued that today’s anthropology museum must now be a public place to discuss problematic collections while also allowing for restitution on a case-by-case basis. He said today’s cultural audience no longer tolerates unethically sourced museum exhibits.
“We didn’t want to walk around the museum and keep thinking, ‘Okay, this is interesting, but is someone somewhere asking for it back?'” he said.
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