The Colonial Museum in a Post-Colonial World

What remains on display of the original "Colonial Museum" is half-way down these stairs on either side of the landing.

There is, buried in the complex of Italian museums that sit mostly unvisited in EUR (about 8 kilometers/5 miles from the Coliseum but easily accessible by metro) a "museum" that purports to display, and deal with, Italy's colonial past. Just finding this collection tells one something about the country's failure to confront its activities in northern Africa, colonial activities that stretched from the 1890s to the fall of Fascism in World War II. (encyclopedia.com has excellent historical background on the Italian colonies.)

Changes in the museum's name and location over the years underscore Italy's approach to the colonies. 

Likely the entrance near the zoo,
before the museum acquired
its new name.  

The museum opened in 1924, in the early years of Fascism, as Museo Coloniale, the Colonial Museum, on the Quirinale, near the seat of government, and it was designed to create pride in Italy's quests. It was not conceived of as scientific (as were similar museums in other European countries), but very much like a trade show, under the Ministry of the Colonies. There were 20 rooms, each featuring a different city or region. (There was an earlier version, dating from 1904, featuring flora from the colonies, located near a botanical institute on via Panisperna in the Monti quarter).

In 1932, the Colonial Museum was moved next to the zoo, perhaps indicating the attraction of the "exotic other," including animals like the lion. Mussolini inaugurated it with a new name a year or so later, "Museo dell'Africa Italiana" (Museum of Italian Africa). It showcased "dangerous" African fauna and the bravery of collectors, deemed "pioneers." In addition to animal trophies, there was the blood-stained uniform of General Rodolfo Graziani, known as the "butcher of Fezzan" for his brutal methods in Libya. (There's a fascinating, unsympathetic portrayal of him [by Oliver Reed] in The Lion in the Desert, an excellent 1980 film by Moustapha Akkad [Anthony Quinn plays the heroic Bedouin leader, Omar Mukhtar]. Banned in Italy when released, it was first available there in 2009 via pay TV, and now one can purchase it on DVD - worth the price.)

The museum remained closed from 1937 (ostensibly to be redesigned; there's some dispute over this date - Wikipedia [Italian] suggests it remained open until 1943) to 1947. 

The museum reopened after World War II as "Museo Africano" ("African Museum"), but even then, the Italians described it (in a 1948 memo to the United Nations) as dealing with "previously unproductive tribes." It remained open until 1970, when it was essentially abandoned. There was also a major theft in 1977. None of this information appears in Wikipedia, which simply says its tutelage was "then entrusted to the Italian-African Institute, which from 1995 was reorganized as the Italian Institute for Africa and the East, both placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2011 that Institute was considered defunct, and the collection (in very poor condition and without proper labelling) was transferred again to the overall Ministero dei beni culturali (Ministry of cultural works) and warehoused.

So where is it, and where are the 12,000 objects - objects of "others" gathered to be observed by Europeans - and what is its name now?

From EUR's central Piazza Marconi, we trooped around to
several of the museum buildings, past many entrances closed
and others open to other activities, finally to find a
temporary entrance to "the Pigorini" and a woman behind
the desk who finally knew what we were talking about.

We had read the museum was located in the newly-reorganized complex under the overall name "Museo della Civiltà" - which was the name of one of the several museums in EUR, and whose entrance graced the cover of our second guidebook, "Modern Rome" (that entrance now leads to the planetarium! - yes, we tried asking there about the "Museo Africano," which the visitor desk had never heard of), re-branded as "MuCiv" (!) and incorporating the several museums that were in EUR, including the original "Museo della Civiltà," which has been closed "for renovations" since 2014 (and it's unfortunate that the public cannot see its great model of ancient Rome). In 2022, MuCiv is asking the public for input on its plans for a radical refashioning of its collections. In English and Italian you can find those current plans here and here.

The entrance on our book cover
won't get you there.

Success! of a sort.  We found our way to a temporary, new entrance to another part of MuCiv, the crown jewel of the museums, Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini (known as "the Pigorini"), and after some discussion with the ticket seller, she gave us free journalists' passes, and we found what is now called the Museo Italo Africano Ilaria Alpi, or the Italian-African Museum, now named for a young Italian journalist killed in Mogadishu in 1994. 

What exists are a few objects (photos right and left and below) on either side of the landing of a stairway (albeit a monumental, large stairway, photo at top of post), accompanied by some plastic sheets indicating the questions raised by retaining and showing objects collected by colonists. 

The object at right is a "statuette of the Konso," "donated" by a Captain. It's hard to read the inscription (left) but it says something to the effect that "when a Konso (from SW Ethiopia) husband died, his wives were buried with him, and that this (I assume the tall statuette next to the plaque) was the tomb of a woman buried alive, according to superstition...

and that this was the first of the objects the Captain "astutely brought back - in 1927."

The plastic sheet hanging alongside these objects says, in Italian and English, "From the seventies of the last century up to 2017, the colonial collections had been locked in cases. They were moved, over several decades, between various institutions in Rome. The colonial Museum, and the history that it represents, were never challenged either on a museographic stage or in a public debate. Opening the cases through the collections, rescuing the latter with conservation interventions and making them accessible to the civil society are the first necessary steps so as to not allow the Italian colonial experience to be forgotten."

Italy is one of many countries confronting its colonial past. According to the panel discussion I observed at the Swiss Institute in Rome, "Erased Memories: Italian colonialism and its material legacies," it has done a very poor job so far in this regard. The scholars talked about "historical amnesia, cancelling, and the failure of Italian memory to accept" its colonial past. Waves of ex-colonial subjects, including Albanians as well as Africans, came into Italy in the 1990s, raising issues of responsibility and acceptance. The new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has run, like Trump, on a fiercely anti-immigrant platform. I should point out as well that while the objects were put under the auspices of the Ministry of beni culturali, the paper objects, including labels and such material as there is on provenance, were given to the National Library, according to the speakers at the Swiss Institute, which included Beatrice Falcucci who has written on  "The former Museo Coloniale in Rome and beyond: colonial collections in Italy between history and the present." The separation of objects and paper does not auger well for placing the materials in their proper context. In other words, it will be difficult for Italy, given its current custody arrangements, to make the claim that it can do a better job of preserving these materials than can their places of origin.

Admittedly, this project (the objects we saw and their measly space) is a first step and is designed to let the public participate in the "unveiling." It is in fact called "Unveiled storages" and is described as "an installation that aims to place the former Museo coloniale collections at the heart of the MuCiv's museum spaces...to render objects accessible to everyone, even if only partially, that seem hidden from view and that had been hidden for several decades."

Above, the well-designed hall on the first floor of the Pigorini ethnographic museum.
This floor is mostly devoted to objects from Africa.

On the first floor (second floor, English style) of the Pigorini is a very high-quality exhibition of African objects collected before the Fascist era. But don't these raise similar questions? Where do they belong? Who "gave" them and why? The Swiss Institute speakers asked if there even could be a post-colonial museum. Should the main purpose be a cross-cultural approach, or preservation, or repatriation?

There is an informative video, in English by the Goethe Institute, on the ongoing project.

I've put more photos at the end of this post. The first one describes the Fascists' use of ancient Roman imagery, including colonialism; most of the rest are of the ethnographic exhibit.

Dianne

Certainly looks like the artworks that inspired Picasso.

A beautiful stained glass window is at the end of the large staircase.

It's signed by "Giulio Rosso, dis. [designed by],
Art glass window. G.C. Giuliani, es. [the window maker]
Rome 1942 - XXI [Fascist year 21]"

Rome’s newest museum: The Museum of Rescued Art

photo by Larry Litman (all photos except as noted are by Litman)

Exciting recent news out of Rome: the opening of a museum dedicated to stolen – and recovered – works, rather than one-off shows such as those held once in a while in Castel Sant’Angelo’s exhibition space or the Carabinieri museum, as occurred in 2016.

Now there’s a beautifully refurbished space that Rome resident Larry Litman (retired AmBrit librarian) recently visited and writes about here (more on Larry’s bio later in this post).

Before we launch into Larry’s first-hand guide to the new museum and his many photos of the Carabinieris' marvelous finds, we'll explore some of the hot topic news and issues surrounding the museum and the works.

Hardly a week goes by without news of “stolen” artworks being discovered in places far from where they were taken. Just this month, the New York Times reported 27 ancient artifacts, valued at $13 million, were seized from the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art. Interestingly, it’s the Manhattan District Attorney’s office that seized the items at 3 separate times, including 21 Italian pieces taken from the Met in July, pieces that are similar to the head of Esculapius, below, from the current Rome exhibit. (One has to wonder, as one does these days, why did they have to seize the works? Why didn't the Met willingly turn them over?)

This head of Esculapius, above,
copied from a Greek original,
is from the late 2nd-3rd
century AD and was taken from the
Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

A few days earlier, the FBI Art Crime Team reported in a news release that it had recently returned to Italy a 2000-year-old mosaic. “The enormous work had been cut into 16 pieces and stored in individual pallets in a Los Angeles storage facility since the 1980s. Each pallet weighed between 75 and 200 pounds.”

We, at RST, are familiar with the art recovery section of the Italian national police, the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, or TPC (Cultural Heritage Protection Squad), but we hadn’t known of the Manhattan DA’s interest in these objects, nor the FBI's – it seems they have enough else going on these days!

Special Agents Elizabeth Rivas and Allen Grove traveled
to Italy for the repatriation of the mosaic to its home in Rome 
- photo from FBI news release.

Similarly flanking their "prize," the Carabinieri
at their 2016 news conference on art (which
we attended and covered in a post) they
had recovered, in this case a Canaletto, from
the 18th century (photo by William Graebner).

The “recovered” artworks raise multiple issues, including how a country such as Italy or Greece or even Ethiopia (more about Ethiopia in a future post) can conserve, protect, and display these objects. Italy has taken the approach of returning them to the regions from which they came, a somewhat controversial position.

Outside their storage area, next to Santa Maria
a Ripa in Trastevere, we saw the Carabinieri's 
art truck promoting their "100 opere tornano a casa" -
"100 works return home." (Photo by William Graebner)

This year in Rome we saw the area in Trastevere where the recovered artworks are – temporarily one hopes – stored. And then there’s the issue of where do the objects really belong? What about Greek vessels that were spoils of war in Greece, brought to Rome, and then stolen from Italy? To which region or country should they be returned?

Larry notes “Several years ago I visited Aidone in Sicily to see an amazing statue of Venus returned from the Getty museums in Los Angeles and a collection of Silver Plates from the Met. The region built a museum in a redundant convent to house these items and other artifacts from the area.” The long saga of the Getty's involvement in stolen works, including lawsuits and criminal actions, are well-reported in David Price Williams's 2015 "Looking for Aphrodite." The Getty also helped restore items for the Aidone museum, and put some of the objects on display (this time, on loan) at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, a sort of reciprocity (we were fortunate to see Venus in Los Angeles, before she left for Sicily). So, maybe there’s an advantage to spreading this “wealth” around. Although New York Times' writer Elizabeth Polvoledo had a different experience from Larry's in the once-Etruscan hub of Cerveteri, near Rome, where the museum did not have the staff to stay open (see caption under Larry's photo of the Etruscan female antefix below).

Journalist and author Sari Gilbert also used a stolen Etruscan vessel as the key to her intriguing murder mystery set in 1980s Rome, "Deadline Rome: the Vatican Kylix," which we reviewed here. As noted above, current, exciting, hot topics involving 2000-year-old art.

This is RST's 4th post from our "man [almost always] on the ground" in Rome, Larry Litman. Larry wrote eloquently in March 2020 about being in Rome under one of the first lockdowns. He gave a virtual tour of the unusual presepi or crèches in Piazza San Pietro (St. Peter’s Square) that year when almost no one was there to see them, and he was one of the first (as he is this time) to see the inside of the Tomb of Augustus, newly opened last year.

Larry is a retired teacher/librarian from Ambrit International School and is active at St. Paul's Within the Walls (the Episcopal Church on via Nazionale). He also volunteers at the Non-Catholic Cemetery. 

Rome’s newest museum: The Museum of Rescued Art - by Larry Litman 

Entrance (after you've purchased your ticket
around the block), still with "Planetario"
above the doorway.

In June the Rome Museum of Rescued Art (Museo dell’Arte Salvata) opened in the Octagonal Hall of the Baths of Diocletian, a 3rd century AD space within the ancient baths that many Romans identify as the Old Planetarium. (The new Planetarium is in the modern neighborhood of EUR and was built in 1928.) [Note to RST readers, the Planetarium is where the Museo della civiltà romana used to be, making the cover of our Modern Rome guidebook now misleading. Bill’s office, when he taught at La Sapienza in 1993, overlooked the Old Planetarium, now the Museum of Rescued Art.]

 

A 2nd century AD copy of a Greek statue
 of Doriforous by Polyleitos,
from the Baths of Caracalla;
so presumably it will stay in Rome.

The Museum of Rescued Art will present changing exhibitions of objects recovered by the Carabinieri unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

For the foreseeable future there will be enough recovered items to keep the museum going. It’s giving a visible profile of the Carabinieri unit involved, discouraging theft and encouraging restitution/return.

 

This initial exhibition features about 100 objects from more than 200 artifacts, dated from the 6th century BC to the 3rd century AD, stolen over the past 50 years, that were returned to Italy from the United States between December 2021 and June 2022. The New York Times, in a piece about the new museum, called this location a “pit stop,” because all objects at some point will be returned to their places of origin in Italy.

 

An Etruscan female antefix
(ornaments at the eaves of a
building), from the beginning
of the 5th century BC. It's
unclear where this statue will
end up, possibly in a special
museum in Cerveteri, home to
many Etruscan artifacts. 
But that museum does not have 
the funds to stay open much,
according to Elizabeth Polvoledo
in her New York Times piece,
cited above..

The soaring dome of the Octagonal Hall [photo at top of post] is an impressive environment for this new Museum of Rescued Art. 

 

Admission for the National Roman Museum also allows entrance to the exhibition of recently returned artifacts. (Note: You must buy the admission ticket at the main museum entrance facing Termini Station and then walk around the block, through Piazza della Repubblica, to enter the Museum of Rescued Art.)

 

Explanatory panels on the display cases are in Italian and English, identifying the objects in each case as well as presenting a narrative about the work of the Carabinieri to identify stolen art and negotiate the return of works from private collectors, museums and galleries with the cooperation of authorities in the United States.

More photos and descriptions follow.

Ceremonial Kramer with four handles
surmounted by red impasto bowls
overpainted with white ("white on red"),
produced in Northern Lazio.

Decorated Etruscan terracotta storage
vessels. Again, one wonders where these
objects will end up.

Statue of Artemis, 2nd century AD,
from the Baths of Caracalla.

Etruscan olpe (pitcher) made
 in a Corinthian style with animal friezes,
first half, 6th century BC.

Black and white painted terracotta vessel
from the ancient town of Crustumerium,
a site now identified about 10 miles north
of Rome near Settebagni, 7th century BC.

Brown cremation urn in the shape of a house
with figured decorations (horse, soldier and boat)
on the walls and on the lid. 7th century BC.

Etruscan terracotta votive heads,
8th century BC.

Teens Gather





We figured these Roman teens were on a field trip to the Museo della Civilta' Romana, located in EUR in one of those massive, 1940-ish buildings beloved by Mussolini and the Fascists.  The huge entrance door (also characteristic of monumental Fascist architecture) is at right, and an enormous column, signifying the building's--and the regime's--link to the ancients, is at left.  We liked the gendered way in which the teens had arranged themselves.   Bill