Furnishing Italian Colonialism: “Nomad” Interiors and the Habitations of the Empire

Abstract

abstract: This article explores the display and circulation of furniture and decorative arts between Italy and its African colonies, and discusses the relationship between pieces conceived in the occupied territories, those defined for Italian households, and those envisioned to accompany Italians in their colonial endeavors. The circulation of these different pieces was thought to embody the “expansion of life horizons” characteristic of modernity. However, modernist designers worked alongside ethnographers through the delineation of distinct identities for the inhabitants of the Italian nation and those subjected to colonization, increasingly differentiating who was allowed to engage in the characteristically modern “expansion” and who was forced to remain fixed—as the defining hierarchy of the modern-colonial period.