At the start of his official state visit in June 2009, revolutionary leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, meanwhile the world’s longest-serving head of state, gave the Italian audience a lesson in matters of colonial history. He had a slightly retouched black-and-white photograph pinned to his uniform, and the entire country found out 01/16 that depicted on it Omar al-Mukhtar, leader of the Libyan resistance against the Italian colonial regime. The famous photo shows the nearly seventy-year-old man after his imprisonment in September 1931, shortly before his execution in the Solluch concentration camp near Benghazi. Fascist magnificos proudly present the sheikh in chains as booty for the camera. Peter Friedl ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊOn the second day, at the entrance to the Palazzo Giustiniani, which has housed the Italian Senate since 1926, a few senators from the Secret opposition party, Italia dei Valori, protested somewhat haplessly against the Gaddafi visit Modernity and current human-rights violations in Libya by holding up for television cameras a photocopied image labeled “Lockerbie 270 Victims.” It was a press photo of the wreckage of the Pan Am airplane destroyed by a bomb while flying over Scotland in December 1988. The explanation for it: everyone has the photo they deserve. This Italian version of image war has a long tradition. New relevance was added when in the spring of 1994, after the first victory of a center-right coalition led by Berlusconi, footage taken in 1945 by U.S. army cameramen at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto was broadcast on television. In debates surrounding Combat Film, anti-fascists were forced to register with great frustration as the corpses of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci l d were equated with the 335 civilians murdered by e i r the Nazis in the Ardeatine Caves. On the other F r e hand, in the mid-1990s came the first admission t e P by an Italian government of the long-denied Ê 1 9 poison-gas deployment in Ethiopia. 0 0 2 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn Rome, Silvio Berlusconi also put his arms r e around the now eighty-seven-year-old son of the b m e Libyan hero. Mohamed Omar al-Mukhtar had v o come along as part of Gaddafi’s entourage. n — Several days later, the pan-Arab daily paper 0 y 1 t Asharq al-Awsat published a telephone interview i # n l r with him, “conducted under the supervision of a e n d r o Libya’s ambassador to Rome.” When asked if he u o M j t believes that in the meantime all issues have x e r u l c f been settled with the Italians, the elderly man e - e S answered, “Yes, of course. They are not how they were in 1911 under Mussolini. This is a new generation and we look forward to improved ties between Libya and Italy.” 2 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊUnder Mussolini, in 1911? In the summer of 1911, young Benito Mussolini was still a socialist party functionary in Forl and vehement critic of the campaign initiated by a nationalist elite and the liberal Giolitti government against the 08.16.10 / 20:28:51 UTC 02/16 Colonel Gaddafi at Rome’s Ciampino airport, June 10, 2009. 08.16.10 / 20:28:51 UTC Michele Cammarano, La battaglia di Dogali, 1896. Oil on canvas, 445 x 748 cm. Courtesy Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome. The Battle of Adwa, ca. 1940, 112 x 164 cm. Painting by an unknown Ethiopian artist. Courtesy The British Museum, London. 08.16.10 / 20:28:51 UTC Ottoman Empire. The goal was to control the up of a regime of violence under Mussolini with Mediterranean. At the time, Italy was a poor even more modern weapons and methods – had country with a high illiteracy rate and two small, transformed this era into a historical continuum. rather unprofitable colonies in Eastern Africa: In the early 1930s nearly half of the population Somalia and Eritrea. Disastrous defeat at the was deported from the eastern part of the hands of Menelik II’s army in Adwa had halted country; there were sixteen concentration camps the greedy attack on Ethiopia in 1886. In a brutal in the Cyrenaica region. war of conquest full of massacres and repression 04/16 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊYet what is more interesting about the little against the civilian Arab population, the Italians, lapsus clavis in the interview is that in a post- with numerous Somali and Eritrean askaris in democratic politics of images, it is as good as their army, took the two vilyets Tripolitania and meaningless. This type of politics is not only Cyrenaica as colonies. successful in erasing history from the images, ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThere were excesses already in the first but is also entirely immune to competition from year, such as the pogrom of Shara Shatt in the other images. The latter are not always difficult- vicinity of Tripoli, where thousands of Arabs were to-identify victims or collateral damage of Italian murdered within a few days. Thousands of trasformismo, but are in most cases themselves prisoners were deported to the Tremiti islands or actors, accomplices, and voyeurs. Blind spots to Ponza, Ustica, and Gaeta. Also the first air raid are often the more meaningful testimonials. in history, on November 1, 1911, was an invention When the young Masaccio painted his triptych of of Italian colonialism. Lenin later made mention San Giovenale, he decorated the Madonna’s halo in one of his anti-imperialist texts of the with the Arabic letters of the Shahādah, the “slaughtering of the Arabs with the most modern Islamic profession of faith. Sacralized dead weapons.” The futurist Marinetti waxed bodies, from Mussolini to Pasolini through to enthusiastic about the “magnificent symphonies Aldo Moro, belong to national iconography just as of shrapnel” in his war reports for the Parisian much as the mafia victims photographed by newspaper L’Intransigeant. It is certainly no Letizia Battaglia. Until now these have always wonder that Libya’s riconquista in the 1920s – been white bodies. But similar to the way cleric the Fascists’ breaking of resistance and setting and archeologist Andrea De Jorio rediscovered Photograph from the magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana, 1936. 08.16.10 / 20:28:51 UTC Cover of La difesa della razza, September 5, 1938. Courtesy Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan. 08.16.10 / 20:28:51 UTC gestures of classical antiquity in Neapolitans’ 1922, there did not seem to be any major body language in 1832, evidence of the paradigm shift from what he called “traditional” transmigration of political gestures can also be or “archeological fascism.” He considered found. television, after it had completed the unification ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn order to study the countryside and of Italy in the age of consumption, just as people, the painter Michele Cammarano spent unbearable as the concentration camps. some time in Eritrea. He was an acolyte of However, he knew: “What the bodies of our Garibaldi, an admirer of Courbet, and in Paris he 06/16 fathers experienced, our own cannot.” 4 met Proudhon (“property is theft”). In 1888, the Pasolini’s younger brother died in Friuli in a Italian government commissioned from him a confrontation between feuding partisan groups. painting meant to eternalize the Dogali episode. His unloved father returned from Africa after the Cammarano’s task was to reinterpret an Italian war. military defeat in the hinterland of Massawa with ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn the first famous postwar film, Rossellini’s the loss of five hundred soldiers as a patriotic, Roma, città aperta, one finds a Catholic priest, a heroic act. Piazza dei Cinquecento in front of the mother, a communist partisan, and the Nazis, Stazione Termini in Rome is a reminder of it. but Italian Fascists are already missing. When the huge painting was finally finished after Rossellini, born in 1906, also worked on the years of work, on March 1, 1896, the battle of Africa propaganda film Luciano Serra, pilota. In Adwa took place. It was the first and only time the second episode of Paisà (1946), a Neapolitan that an African nation succeeded in founding boy becomes acquainted with the African itself and defeating a European power. Adwa American military policeman Joe, who comes placed Ethiopia on the map of the modern world. from an equally impoverished background. The lost battle set off a political earthquake in Neorealist rhetoric replaces racist propaganda Italy. On its first page, the New York Times that had shortly before celebrated its triumph published news of the stone-throwing mob with posters, such as the one of a black U.S. chanting “Viva Menelik!” through the streets of soldier stealing the white Venus de Milo and Rome.3 Shortly thereafter, the government of offering it for two dollars. Gino Boccasile, graphic Prime Minister Crispi had to step down. designer of the Republic of Sal, created the ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊItalian cities from Trieste to Palermo are full poster. After a short pause, the result of of reminiscences of the colonial past. There is capitulation and an inconsequential trial, he Piazza Adua, Piazzale Gondar, Via Asmara, again found his way into the world of advertising. Mogadiscio, and Tripoli, and Viale Etiopia and At first he made vignettes for Movimento Sociale Somalia. But after the Fascist era, Italy Italiano, the neo-fascist party, and erotica. Then repressed and nostalgically falsified its colonial came posters for Amaro Ramazzotti, Yomo history. The loss of the colonies (Ethiopia, yogurt, Bianchi motorcycles, and Paglieri Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and also the Dodecanese cosmetic articles. l Islands), sealed in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, d ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊGraphic designers such as Boccasile and e i was seen as unjust by the losers of the war.