Monuments of Italian Colonialism as a Transcultural Heritage

Abstract

This essay addresses the material legacies of Italian colonialism, reframing them as a transcultural heritage. With a focus on the complex interplay between memory and displacement, the study retraces the biographies of selected historical monuments from the late nineteenth century to fascism up until postcolonial Italy. Comparing the life and afterlives of the Monument to the Fallen Soldiers of Dogali, still preserved in a public space in Rome, with monuments implicated in processes of restitution, such as the Axum Stele and the statue of the Lion of Judah, both returned to Ethiopia, the essay reflects upon the dynamics of invisibility and absence, examining decolonial claims, and new layers of memory that currently overlap in politically charged spaces.