ROME (AP) — For decades, Italy has worked to recover ancient Roman statues, Etruscan vases and other treasures looted from the soil and sold to museums around the world. Now the country is trying to come to terms with the fact that there were also stolen items in its own museum collections. It is a relic of North Africa’s brutal colonial empire that is not fully grasped.
For more than a year, a team of museum directors, university researchers and academics has been conducting a “census” of the collections of Italy’s 498 national museums to get an accurate picture of their holdings. Its purpose is to meet the demands of repatriation, which will only increase in the general considerations surrounding the legacy of European colonial empires and related racial justice, to the extent that Italian museums may retain To provide preliminary data on weapons, artifacts, and ceremonial objects to government authorities. movement.
The survey was conducted at a time when museums and governments in Europe and the Americas were undergoing a major shift in giving back cultural relics to their countries of origin and communities. These museums believe that they cannot in good conscience keep objects if they were acquired as a result of historical violence, colonial rule, looting, or war.
Even the Vatican has jumped on the return bandwagon, recently returning to Greece three pieces of Parthenon marble that had been preserved for two centuries. if you steal you have to return itexplained Pope Francis.
The audit of Italy that began under the previous government continues under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy’s Brotherhood Party, which has roots in the neo-fascist party, successor to dictator Benito Mussoli. Mussolini’s fascist regime is most closely associated with Italy’s North African colonies covering the protectorates of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, and Albania. The empire began in his late 19th century, but Mussolini tried to expand it but was forced to abandon it after World War II, ending the final Somali government in Italy in 1960.
“There was more temporary colonial history than Britain, Germany, France or Belgium, but the problem cannot be underestimated,” said Massimo Osanna, the culture ministry official in charge of the museum, on the return. said at a recent conference. “We need to rethink collections, rethink institutions, rethink narrative transparency, and rethink case-by-case reparations.”
Osanna commissioned a group of museum directors and academics led by Christian Greco, director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, to audit. The committee has assembled a dozen graduate students who are helping curators examine warehouses and archives and understand what’s there.
In an interview, Greco acknowledged the issue of reversion, saying Italy’s colonial past remains sensitive. He said he expected resistance when he sent out a questionnaire to the museum asking if there were any.
“We expected people to be afraid, but in fact the opposite is happening. People are very excited that this is happening.” report and then hold an international symposium later in the year to discuss the findings.
“Objects don’t necessarily tell us about the past, they tell us a lot about us,” says Greco. “When I look at ancient Egyptian objects, do they tell me anything about ancient Egyptian civilization, or more about Eurocentrism?”
Italy’s experiment in coming to terms with its colonial past, including the recent Restoration Conference, is based on the Museum of Civilization, one of the giant travertine blocks of Fascist architecture in Mussolini’s utopia district EUR, south of Rome. It seems appropriate that .
The museum itself is a marvel, having been renamed in 2016 to a collection of 2 million items from six older collections including the Colonial Museum, Oriental Museum, Medieval Museum, Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum, and Traditional Museum. popular art.
The most problematic of these is the 12,000-piece collection of the Colonial Museum, founded in 1923 by Mussolini himself. The museum, which originally consisted of booty brought home by Italian military officers in North Africa, was not intended to teach Italians about Africa. Rather, it was to show people at home the greatness of Italian military conquests abroad and how they helped provide raw materials for Italian industry.
“It was propaganda, a pure propaganda museum aimed at creating a colonial consciousness in its visitors,” said curator Rosa Anna Di Lella.
The museum’s warehouses are filled with impressive busts of mustachioed Italian military heroes. Specimens of Libyan cotton, Eritrean sunflower seeds, and Somali beans. Gypsum facial masks made on living subjects are relics of anthropological research on racial typology, and today are highly controversial and not on display.
Andrea Vigliani, director of the Museum of Civilizations, is embarking on a fundamental rethinking of the museum, its troubled collections and stories from Italy’s colonial past, starting with a preliminary exhibition in June. .
Alongside a section on restitution, the exhibit includes two large murals stolen from the Ethiopian parliament by Italian forces. Also on display: Paintings of his 1896 Battle of Adwa, decisive in the First Italo-Ethiopian War, which (temporarily) halted the advance of the Italian kingdom in North Africa.
Most Italian renditions of the battle depict defeated Italian “martyrs”. The works on display were painted by Ethiopian artists and celebrate Ethiopia’s victory, which came to symbolize pan-African independence at a time when European empires were dividing the continent.
Bigliani said it’s time for ethnographic museums like him to give voice to previously untold people and tell history in a different way. Italy is a bit behind other European countries, but it plays a unique role given that it is both perpetrator and victim of looting.
“We’re just getting started. It’s still a precisely structured beginning… testing the ground, finding the language,” he said. “
For Italy, the issue of restitution is not completely unfamiliar. Italy has spearheaded the legal framework to bring back thousands of antiquities stolen from the soil by unscrupulous “tombaroli” or tomb robbers in recent decades. It recovered so much loot that a museum of salvaged art was recently inaugurated. Here, returned items spend time in Rome before being sent back to the region where they were stolen.
And Italy has returned a ton of Holocaust-era and other stolen booty over the years, with four returns unveiled in Egypt this week. We have embarked on two returns that have attracted the attention of In 2005, Italy returned her 160-ton giant Axum obelisk to Ethiopia. Mussolini ordered it sent to Rome in 1937 after he conquered Ethiopia. And in 2008, then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi handed over the Venus of Cyrene, an ancient Roman statue taken by Italian forces in 1913, to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.
The statue reportedly disappeared in the turmoil that engulfed Libya following the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, and even if stripped of its cultural context, its relics remain safe in European museums. It fell prey to critics of the return, who argued that humanity would be better served if it could be kept and seen by millions of people.
Dan Hicks, an Oxford archaeologist spearheading the return of Benin’s bronzes and other cultural relics, said the ‘keep and explain’ argument was silly, suggesting that Italy was the only European He said it was right to join the museum and return the loot.
Speaking with Osanna at the repatriation conference, Hicks argued that today’s anthropological museums must become public venues to discuss problematic collections while still allowing restitution on a case-by-case basis. , says that today’s cultural audience no longer tolerates unethically sourced museum exhibits.
“I would walk around the museum and say, ‘OK, this is funny, but is there anyone out there asking to give it back?'” he said.
