ITALIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 2, AUTUMN 2006

CONSTRUCTING MUSSOLINI’S NEW MAN IN AFRICA? ITALIAN

MEMORIES OF THE FASCIST WAR ON ETHIOPIA
Memoirs written by those involved in the Ethiopian War were an important means through which
the Fascist regime justified the invasion, and promoted the glory of Empire. In the post-war
period, memoirs of the campaign continued to be published, and they constitute one of the rare
places in which the memory of Empire was cultivated and nurtured. The writers of these texts had
different views of the colonial experience, and this article aims to examine a range of these
accounts in order to understand their diversity. It also suggests that this diversity is indicative of
the problematic concept of ‘consent’ to the Fascist regime.

memory and neglect

Between 1935 and 1936, the machinery of Fascist propaganda sought to fix the
attention of everyone in Italy onto Ethiopia.1 However, the first Italians forced to
‘experience’ the Empire were those sent to conquer it. Volunteers, re-enlisted reserv-
ists, conscripts, the military, Blackshirts, soldiers, officers, Italians of every region:
almost half a million people — it was said — were mobilized and sent to fight in
Ethiopia. The war sparked off by Fascism was not a traditional European colonial
campaign, entrusted to a small operational corps of fewer than a thousand men. For
Italy, this was a national, modern, and mass war.
Between 1936 and 1940 Fascism made heroes out of the combatants who had
conquered the Empire. The anniversary of the foundation of the Empire was
celebrated by the regime every May. The combatants, above all those who had fought
in Blackshirt units, were at the centre of these, and similar, demonstrations.
Without this background information, it is difficult to understand the extensive
quantity of memoirs that started to be published near the end of the operations
in 1936 by those who had fought in the war. Combatants from every rank and every
type of military unit, from each of the fronts of the Ethiopian War, recorded their
memories, published books, and left traces of their experiences of the war that the
regime — by means of the Empire — continued to glorify. Leafing through their
published memoirs, we can read what they thought about themselves, about their
military experience, about Fascism, and about the Empire. These texts offer an insight
into what they thought, and what the regime wanted Italians to think.2
After 1945 there was a drastic change. The Republic, its citizens, and all too
often its historians, no longer talked about the colonial Empire. Not everyone was
comfortable with this silence, however. The ex-combatants of the Ethiopian War who
still wanted to identify with the experience could not go along with it. As a result,

1
See Fascismo e politica di potenza. Politica estera 1922–1939, Enzo Collotti (Florence: La Nuova Italia,
2000); Giorgio Rochat, Guerre italiane 1936–1943 (Turin: Einaudi, 2005); Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in
Africa Orientale (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1976–84), and Gli italiani in Libia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986–
88); Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).
2
See Nicola Labanca, Una guerra per l’impero. Memorie dei combattenti della campagna d’Etiopia 1935–36
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005).

225
© The Society for Italian Studies 2006 DOI: 10.1179/007516306X142951
226 nicola labanca

they continued to remember and to write, even after Italian colonialism, Fascism, and
the war had ended. Their memory was, if anything, radicalized. As late as the 1990s,
those who had been the youngest combatants in 1935–1936, and were then some
eighty or ninety years old, continued to publish their memoirs, revealing the extraor-
dinary vitality of an identity that — for these authors — clearly counted for more than
anything else. This constituted an individual, or collective, memory that had survived
the failure of the political and ‘social cadres’ that produced it: a colonial memory, first
during the period of decolonization, and then during that of post-colonialism.
Unfortunately this considerable number of memoirs remained unstudied. The work
of Angelo Del Boca, for a long time the only Italian scholar to reconstruct in detail
the trajectory of Italian deeds — and misdeeds — in Africa, has been helpful, but
primarily in the reconstruction of facts. The memory of the combatants served as a
document, but not as a historical problem in and of itself. Historians have neglected
to pursue this line of inquiry. Attention has been paid to memoirs from both World
Wars. Studies have also been carried out on the memoirs of the Risorgimento Wars,
along with the small colonial expeditions. But the richest and most substantial
memoirs of those who fought in the Ethiopian War remain unpublished.3
This was only the second mass war won by the regular military forces of a united
Italy (aside from the more limited campaigns of the Risorgimento and Unification). It
was also the first, and perhaps the only, war won by the first European Fascist regime:
it was Mussolini’s first national, mass war. How might we explain historians’ neglect
of the memory of its combatants?
fascist memories of a fascist war
Italian servicemen who fought in 1935–36 did not say much about their involvement
with the people of Ethiopia in their published memoirs. Of course, some level of
involvement was not absent from their experience but they preferred to leave it in
unpublished memories, in diaries kept at home, and in the family.4 The public dimen-
sion of the memory of the Ethiopian war emphasized the violence of the encounter,
and so it remained.5
In the pages of published memoirs, the astonishment at the mysteries of Africa
which had been typical of nineteenth-century accounts was absent. The fascinated
interest of travellers and explorers turned into pride at conquest, and discrimination.
Their pages were harsher and different in tone to those written by other Italian
servicemen in the days between Dogali, Adowa, and Tripoli: both sets of memoirs

3
See Adolfo Omodeo, Momenti della vita di guerra. Dai diari e dalle lettere dei caduti 1915–1918 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1968; first published 1933); Mario Isnenghi, Le guerre degli italiani. Parole, immagini, ricordi
1848–1945 (Milan: Mondadori, 1989); La Grande Guerra. Esperienza memoria immagini, ed. by Diego Leoni
and Camillo Zadra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986); Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla
moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1991).
4
See Nicola Labanca, ‘Quaderni di “petits blancs”. Diari e memorie dell’“imperialismo demografico”
italiano’, in Posti al sole. Diari e memorie di vita e di lavoro dall’Africa italiana (Rovereto: Museo Storico
della Guerra, 2001), pp. v–xlvii.
5
See Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, ‘Memories and Legacies of Italian Colonialism’, in Italian
Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005),
pp. 9–27.
 memories of the fascist war on ethiopia 227

were colonialist, of course, but the latter were Liberal, the former were, or wanted
to be, or wanted to sound, Fascist. In order to understand Fascist colonialism, it is
instructive to consider that this happened in the same years in which, for instance,
Gandhi was preparing the independence of India, and when international protest from
Harlem to Indonesia greeted, and isolated, Fascist aggression towards Ethiopia.
The main interpreters of this extension of propaganda into memoir were the highest
ranking officers, the Fascist Party leaders, and individual militiamen. They both
fought and represented the war of the regime. Warlike rhetoric and hyperbole consti-
tute the cornerstones of Fascist identity which, in the intensity of the Ethiopian War,
was meant to move on a step further. The Ethiopian War was meant to help the
regime create the New Man.6
Passo Uarieu! Lo Squadrismo acciaiato, fatto muraglia di carne, più duro del bronzo, più
sonante dell’acciaio. Di qua non si passa! [...] Il 22 gennaio, a passo Uarieu, i Legionari
dovevano essere come i Fanti. E sono stati i Fanti, grandi Fanti. I soldati di Vittorio Veneto
possono presentare le armi ai Militi della Rivoluzione! Passo Uarieu è degno delle più belle
tradizioni del Carso. Esercito e Milizia dimostrano in battaglia di essere ormai una forza unica
nella quale il Risorgimento ed il Fascismo si fondono in una lega di purissimo acciaio. Il
processo rivoluzionario delle Forze Armate collauda il processo rivoluzionario della nazione. Il
Fante è Legionario ed il Legionario è Fante. L’Italia è fatta!7
The Ethiopian War is, for Fascist Party leaders such as Appelius, the synthesis of
Italy’s history (Appelius, p. 33). However, the youngest, most radical Fascists, also
revel in the nature of the war in Ethiopia. The following quotation recaptures the
brutality of that first Fascist military encounter:
le stesse grinte da trincea, la stessa spavalderia soldatesca, i pugni sul tavolo, trenta moccoli al
minuto, e quella sublime ineducazione che distingue gli uomini di un paese guerriero da quelli
di un paese pacifico. Gli arditi. Eccoli i camerati di Sdricca. Non sono invecchiati affatto.
Domani correranno su per le ambe con lo stesso fiato di vent’anni fa, lanciando bombe e
imprecazioni sibilanti tra i denti col pugnale ficcato in bocca di traverso. Tra gli ufficiali della
‘Tevere’ ho rivisto i vecchi della guerra e delle squadre, quelli che non potevano mancare e che
domani, se il Duce ordinasse di andare all’inferno, ci troveremmo tutti laggiù tra le fiamme, la
pece bollente e l’odor di zolfo [...] ed ora qui in A.O, in Somalia, per la più splendida avventura
della vita: la guerra fascista, contro il mondo che si trincera mandandoci contro i barbari del
Leone di Giuda.8

memories of a war for the fascist regime

Not all those fighting in Ethiopia wholeheartedly embraced this rhetoric. In contrast
to those who fought the war of the regime, there were nevertheless many — perhaps
the numerical majority — who simply fought a war for the regime. In 1935–36 the
fascistization of the armed forces, that is, the officer corps, had still to take place,
even if it would never be completely accomplished. There were some officers who had
no enthusiasm for Fascism’s hyperbolic vision, and there were also many ordinary
Italians — that is, many soldiers — who remained perhaps extraneous to, or relatively
unaffected by, the regime’s propaganda, and Fascist belief.

6
See Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 1993).
7
Mario Appelius, Il crollo dell’impero dei negus (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), p. 206.
8
Sandro Sandri, Sei mesi sul fronte somalo. Da Mogadiscio a Neghelli storia viva scritta combattendo
(Milan and Rome: Bertarelli, 1936), p. 174.
228 nicola labanca

Regimes that are fundamentally totalitarian do not permit free expression of

thought. They favour dissimulation and resist inquiring into public opinion. It is
therefore difficult both to find evidence for, and to criticize, the arguments that see a
high level of popular consensus around the Ethiopian War. Historians are still looking
for documentation to understand whether, or in what measure, the Ethiopian War
was — or was not — the highpoint of Mussolini’s success and the ‘war of consent’.
From this perspective, an examination of the published memoirs is revealing.
As noted above, in contrast to those who enthusiastically fought the war of the
regime, there were many officers (rank-and-file soldiers do not publish memoirs) that
simply give the impression of having fought another war for Italy, for the Italian State,
rather than for the Fascist regime. Certainly, we know very well that they were talking
about the same war, that the military were the instrument through which the regime
realized its plans, and that no small number of servicemen explicitly and implicitly
shared the government’s programme of action. In terms of the aggression and the
breach of international peace, the military were not less responsible than the Fascist
Party leaders of the Militia and the regime. From the ethical-political, and perhaps
technical-military, point of view, they could even be more severely judged. Their
responsibility could even be considered greater, seeing that without the strength of the
military institution, the haphazard and poorly-armed detachments of Blackshirts
alone would not have got far.
But we need to remember the importance of distinctions and (what may only appear
to be) gradations. And from the subjective point of view of those involved, there were
differences between those who fought the war of the regime and those who fought it
for the regime. These differences continue to make themselves felt. The soldiers who
fought the war for the regime distanced themselves from the propaganda:
i giovani menavano (e perché non) vanto delle ore di Passo Uarieu. Gli anziani, quelli della
grande guerra — che potevano sbalordirci tutti con qualche cifra: Ortigara 20.000 morti,
Monte Sei Busi il tal reggimento ricostituito in tre giorni sei volte, Altipiani ... un elenco
interminabile — roba da non farci paragone. Guerra questa? Ma no, una serie di combattimenti
[...]. I vecchi del nastrino tricolore e quattro stellette d’argento insomma torcevano un po’ il
muso.9
‘Trinceristi, guerrieracci del Carso e degli Altipiani’ and other soldiers who saw
battle in the Great War could not but laugh at the propaganda of the regime. The
differences between the two conflicts were so many that it was not even worth listing
them all: ‘è guerra questa? Ma vecchi ascari raccontano storie di antiche battaglie in
Tripolitania e in Cirenaica, e nel deserto. Quella era guerra!’10 Besides, things did not
seem to be going smoothly in the war, contrary to what the propaganda said. The
critical observations of the soldiers are quite numerous. Moreover, long-standing
deficiencies in the Italian military apparatus were exposed, and revealed in the mem-
oirs of these servicemen fighting the war for the regime. Knowledge of local languages
was poor: ‘diede saggio della sua conoscenza pratica della lingua araba, rivolgendo la
parola al piccolo giocoliere, ma questi lo pregò di parlargli in italiano se voleva farsi

9
Giovanni Artieri, Cronaca del fronte nord. 2 ottobre 1935–5 maggio 1936 (Milan: Salocchi, 1937), p. 162.
10
Luigi D’Errico, 12 bozzetti africani (Milan: Gastaldi, 1963), p. 10.
 memories of the fascist war on ethiopia 229

capire’.11 Logistics, much vaunted by the regime, were problematic. Not by chance,
one of the writers entitled his volume of memoirs, Cinghia: ‘sublime parola, quella di
“arrangiarsi”. Parola che avevamo imparato a conoscere nell’altra guerra, ma che a
tante migliaia di chilometri dalla patria diventa il viatico di tutti i giorni, diventa
l’unico mezzo per mangiare, per bere, per dormire, per salvare la pellaccia dalle fiere
e dagli uomini’.12 The troops were subjected to gruelling exertions: ‘La truppa è
stanca, dallo sbarco non ci siamo ancora fermati; dal 10 febbraio i soldati non si sono
cambiati neanche la camicia, da venti giorni fanno cinghia con scatoletta e chiarizia,
sovente ridotta a metà razione, non ricordano più che sapore ha il vino’.13 After the
most demanding marches, the appearance of the troops was discouraging: ‘in che
stato in quei giorni: pantaloni strappati, ginocchia e natiche scoperte, chi senza
camicia, chi con giubba sbrindellata, chi colle scarpe rotte da cui spunta un pezzo di
piede che diguazza nel fango; eppure sempre allegri’ (Di Modica, p. 74). In short, the
reality that emerges from these memoirs is anti-heroic rather than heroic.
constructing the new man?
The duality of memory, between those who had fought the war of the regime and
those instead who only fought it for the regime, is relevant to a discussion about the
construction of identities, and about the role of the brutalization of war in con-
structing Italian identity during the time of the Ethiopian campaign and in subsequent
decades. It is interesting to consider that even in the immediate aftermath of the
conflict, the memory of the Ethiopian War was not uniform. In so far as Mussolini set
out with the objective of creating a New Man, the New Fascist, the fact that the
Ethiopian War did not result in homogenous, uniform, and indeed Fascist, memories
represented a failure of that project.14 A difference in the texture of memory suggested
that not all of the participation in the war had been secured by an adherence to
Fascism. In fact, this was not even how it was recalled. If Starace could represent
Fascism because of the position he held, how many memoirs of the soldiers of the
1935–1936 war harboured similar resonances? Badoglio’s account differed from it
quite substantially. But above all, most of the memories of the army officers, who also
wrote about the war, and extolled their participation in it, appeared to be quite
distant from those of the head of the faction at Gondar.
These published memoirs reveal that there was not then a New Man. Moreover,
was the dictator really deluded about the possibility of transforming Italians into New
Men of the Fascist Era? The same historians that have occupied themselves more
specifically with the totalitarian project of the regime do not agree on this point,
particularly when it comes to the events of 1935 and 1936. It is not surprising, then,
that Italians’ approaches to the Ethiopian War, along with their memories, have been
so diverse. In short, an appreciation of such differences becomes important not only
for judging the impact of the war, but also for understanding the dictatorship.

11
Gherardo Pantano, Ventitre anni di vita africana (Florence: Casa editrice militare italiana, 1932), p. 6.
12
Giuseppe Barbèra, L’Africa non fa paura, pref. by Enzo Galbiati (Rome: Unione editoriale d’Italia, 1937),
p. 44.
13
Giovanni Di Modica, Cinghia. Scarpe in AO (Turin: Mariano, 1937), p. 58.
14
See the essays in ‘Militari italiani in Africa. Per una storia sociale e culturale dell’espansione coloniale.
Atti del convegno di Firenze, 12–14 dicembre 2002’, special issue ed. by Nicola Labanca, Società italiana di
storia militare, ‘Quaderno 2001–2002’ (Naples: Esi, 2004).
230 nicola labanca

It was not clear to all the military themselves on what the new Fascist identity of
Italian imperial soldiers was supposed to be based:
spinto dal prepotente bisogno di andare fino in fondo a queste anime per misurare l’ardore
della loro passione fascista, chiedo ad un altro milite:
‘Perché sei venuto in Africa?’
‘Per fare l’Impero.’
‘Che Impero?’
‘L’Impero Fascista di Benito Mussolini.’
‘Sai con precisione che cosa vuole il Duce da tutti noi in questo momento?’
‘Ce lo ha detto ad Eboli. Come sa dirlo lui! Parole poche e chiare. Il resto è affare nostro.’
(Appelius, p. 51)
The Italian military who fought the Ethiopian war must have realized how vague
the concept of Fascist Empire was. This must have made many suspicious of it. Fur-
thermore, why ‘build the Empire’ if no one knew what it was supposed to be? But, if
there was one point about Empire on which everyone agreed — and which in the end
appears to be the lowest common denominator of the notion of Fascist Empire — it
was that the Italians, as a white ‘race’, enjoyed full and limitless dominion over the
Africans.
Questa guerra dimostrerà ancora una volta che l’uomo bianco regge sopra ogni altra razza ad
emozioni, fatiche, malattie e l’Italiano più di tutti. Il piccolo Italiano nostro, con i suoi organi
fragili, la sua statura modesta, nutrito senza scialo, dà prova di capacità e disciplina.15
The widespread nature of this conviction is well attested by many passages in the
memoirs of those combatants who wrote at the height of the Fascist ‘imperialism’ in
which they participated. In this way, we encounter affirmations that at first glance are
less compromising, and almost suggest a kind of shared ‘common sense’:
per sapere come sarà e cosa sarà l’Impero fascista è inutile cercare nei casellari e negli schemi
cosiddetti tradizionali o perdere gli occhi nelle enciclopedie. Perché come nell’ambito della
Nazione col totalitario ordinamento della società nazionale il Fascismo ha posto lo Stato su
altre basi e ha creato quello Stato veramente del Popolo che è lo Stato dei quadri, così
nell’ambito dell’Impero [...] esso darà proiezione e corso a questi quadri creando finalmente
l’imperialismo moderno. Ecco perché — come ha disposto il governo del Viceré — ‘ai lavori
manuali potranno essere adibiti solo indigeni’ e noi non vedremo più per nostra fortuna degli
italiani fare gli spaccapietre, gli scaricatori, gli stradini, i terrazzieri. (pp. 99)
To combatants coming from a nation of workers, and originating in the cradle of
demographic imperialism (or, in the version of its critics, the ‘imperialismo
straccione’), this elementary concept should have sounded sufficiently clear, and in
many ways, attractive. It was not just the mirage of the frontier that made the Ethio-
pian War fascinating, then, but also the prospect of dominion, dominion over the
‘blacks’. As one wrote, ‘un nuovo orgoglio: la razza!’ was to be born within Italians
fighting to conquer Ethiopia.
Giriamo, guardiamo, interroghiamo: è un quadro che sorprende ma non affascina. Alla vista di
questi indigeni nasce in noi un orgoglio che prima non conoscevamo: quello di essere bianchi.
Sentiamo infatti che siamo diversi, che nulla ad essi ci può unire, che essi sono ancora all’abc

15
Franco Ciarlantini, Seconda guerra (Milan: Mondadori, 1938), p. 31.
 memories of the fascist war on ethiopia 231
della civiltà, che hanno bisogno di imparare a lavorare, a sudare, a faticare, a rendere. Che tra
noi e loro c’è veramente un abisso, profondo, incolmabile. Potremo elevarli, potremo
avvicinarli a noi, ma rimarranno sempre al di là di un’invisibile barriera che è vano e può essere
pericoloso superare. E guardandoli, guardandoli bene ci pare che solo partendo da questa base,
solo mantenendo ferme queste distanze gioveremo ad essi ed a noi: potremo farne qualcosa
[...]. Per tutti questi musi neri noi sentiamo di poter essere solo i fascisti, i capi, le guide, i
maestri: mai i commilitoni, mai gli amici, mai i fratelli maggiori!16
Italians command, ‘natives’ work and obey: this is the formula of Empire. Both
those who fought the war of the regime and those who only fought and won the war
for the regime agreed on this point. Perhaps not unpredictably, the Ethiopian War
represented a ‘degree zero’ of an openness to métissage and hybridity on the part of
Fascism.
Those who object that this was the formula behind every colonial project forget
the precise chronological contextualization of the Ethiopian War. While the other
colonial powers set development and colonial autonomy as goals, while anti-colonial
nationalism mounted and Gandhi’s Congress Party organized millions of colonial
subjects in India, and while the Fascist adventure under way in Ethiopia stirred up
protest in all five continents, Italian Fascist propaganda heralded a reactionary return
to the violence of the colonial past.
fascist legacies
But what does this have to do with the history of the Italian Republic?17 Even after
1945, some combatants continued to write down their memories of the Ethiopian
War. As late as 1960, the National Association for the Veterans of Africa (ANRA),
with its own periodical, Il reduce d’Africa, was founded in order to reunite them.18
While other Italians forgot, or sought not to speak of, the Ethiopian War, and critical,
independent historians were slow to appear because of the slow decolonization of
Italian colonial studies, and the control of archival resources by colonialist circles in
republican and democratic Italy, the ex-combatants remained the only (or almost the
only) ones to speak about that war.
In particular, those who still spoke of it were, predictably, not so much those who
had fought the war for the regime (they preferred to remain silent, or felt obliged to
talk about the Second World War). Those who still spoke of it, rather, were the com-
batants who fought the war of the regime. It is not surprising that the memory and
identity of the ex-combatants of the Ethiopian War have remained strongly tied to the
nostalgic memory of the Fascist regime in Italy. The ANRA organization has always
been close to the MSI, the neo-Fascist party, and has often explicitly encouraged
support for it. Not by chance, ANRA only received official recognition in the same
years in which the Right rose more steadily to power in Italy, with the government of
Berlusconi in 2001.
For this reason, the seeds of the Fascists regime’s propaganda have been introduced
into postcolonial, democratic Italy, directly by that regime itself. It may have been

16
Niccolò Giani, 128° battaglione CC.NN. (Milan: Hoepli, 1937), p. 22.
17
See Nicola Labanca, Oltremare.
18
See Charles Burdett, ‘Colonial Associations and the Memory of East Africa’, in Italian Colonialism:
Legacy and Memory, pp. 125–42.
232 nicola labanca

unable to construct a New Man, but some concepts nevertheless took root. Apart
from nostalgia for the ‘maldafrica’, the myth of the Empire has remained a racist
myth. The authority of one race over another has remained tied to the memory of that
experience.
While other countries, and public opinion elsewhere, possess varied colonial records
and memories of the period between the two world wars, democratic Italy has had to
deal with a cumbersome Fascist past. The choice not to come to terms with that past
has allowed some memories to remain alive. In fact, paradoxically, they remain the
only ones. These, for their part, have been made more militant.
The consequence of all this is that the experience of the Ethiopian War has
remained the memory of only one, nostalgic and ageing, part of the nation. Perhaps
Fascism and Mussolini were unable to construct a unique New Man, but they did
have an effect on Italians, and their influence has continued to make itself felt until
today. Italian-published memories were memories of ‘conflict’, and those that might
have suggested some kind of cohabitation between Italians and Ethiopians seemed to
disappear. It has to be stressed that these memoirs cannot be ascribed only to the
obvious, direct influence of the regime. If many of them were published between 1936
and 1945, it is noteworthy that many of the same ideas, approaches, and even
language did not die out with the regime that created them. They remained more or
less the same year after year, decade after decade, well into republican and democratic
Italy, up until today. In fact, memories of the Ethiopian war continued to be
published, even during the 1980s and the 1990s, and a few have been published –
sometimes thanks to their authors’ sons – in the early years of this century. The longe-
vity of the atmosphere of hostility is surprising given that the existence of ‘contact
zones’, and the reasons for a possible ‘incontro’ with the Ethiopian people, were
extraordinarily extensive in 1935–36. Fascist Italy sent against Ethiopia one of the
largest European armies ever to fight in Africa in a colonial war (the largest, in fact,
apart from the British and French in the Boer and Algerian Wars respectively). Half a
million Italians, even if only for a few months, could have created the greatest oppor-
tunity for some kind of ‘incontro’. But their war was a Fascist one. From that point,
a memory trained on ‘scontro’ began, flourished, and survived to the end of the
Fascist regime that created and nurtured it. If today Italians are so little inclined to
métissage, one of the forgotten or undervalued reasons for it can be located in the past
of the Ethiopian War and in the present of those continuing memories.19

University of Siena Nicola Labanca

19
See Paola Tabet, La pelle giusta (Turin: Einaudi, 1997); and more generally the special issues of Modern
Italy, 8 (2001) and Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8: 3 (2003), ed. by J. Andall, C. Burdett, and D.
Duncan; A Place in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. by
Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003); L’Afrique
coloniale et postcoloniale. Dans la culture, la littérature et la société italiennes. Représentations et
témoignages, ed. by Mariella Colin and Enzo Rosario Laforgia (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2003);
Afrika in Italien, Italien in Afrika. Italo-afrikanische Beziehungen, ed. by Immacolata Amodeo and Claudia
Ortner Buchberger (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004); Italian Colonialism. Legacy and Memory,
ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan; Italian Colonialism, ed. by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
(New York: Palgrave, 2005).