This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

In this special issue of Modern Italy, four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology.

For the last 20 years, research on European colonialism has addressed private photo collections. Prior to that, interest was focused specifically on propaganda photography. In the hope that privately kept material could offer new, more ‘authentic’ insights into colonial everyday life, researchers have so far mostly ignored the mass-produced images which are often part of such private collections, too. But especially when the question arises of how mass-produced images functioned as consensus-building tools, of what impact they had on the ground, they seem to be a promising source. Therefore, this paper on mass-produced images of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War in private photography collections probes how ‘ordinary’ soldiers used images, what meanings they created in the process, and, thereby, how they positioned themselves relative to the Fascist regime's dominant colonial discourse. This article answers these questions by drawing on the private collections of four so-called ‘allogeni’, German-speaking Italian citizens from the province of Bozen/Bolzano, who took part in the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.

This study analyses the essential question of the role of visual and material culture in the construction of a mass racial ideology during the Fascist colonial empire. The hypothesis behind this essay is that representations of the facial features of colonised populations may be understood as agents that transform what are in fact inconsistent and vague notions of identity and race into concrete and effective ontologies, both in the scientific field and in the popular imaginary. The facial casts made by the anthropologist Lidio Cipriani and exhibited in the race pavilion of the very popular Mostra triennale delle Terre italiane d'Oltremare (1940) in Naples, the anthropological photographs and illustrations of the infamous journal La Difesa della razza (1938–43), and the advertising images representing African women's bodies, both gave consistency to the notion of race and incarnated its protean nature made up of narratives, metaphors, fantasies, and prejudices constructed and accumulated over time.

This essay will consider some key aspects of the imagery of the ventennio regarding the Italian overseas territories through the analysis of the covers of the illustrated magazine Libia, launched in 1937 in the context of the so-called ‘Fourth Shore’ of Italy, ruled between 1934 and 1940 by governor Italo Balbo. Firstly, this essay will address the existing bibliography on the relations between the press and Italian colonialism. Then, it will examine the figure of Balbo over two sections – one relating to his activities for the development of Libya, the other dedicated to his relationship with the arts – unpacking the close links between the work of the governor in the colony and the periodical. The final part of the article will focus on Libia, examining the themes and subjects chosen to illustrate its covers and the several artists who collaborated with the magazine as illustrators.

This article investigates how the Ethiopian war was represented by Epoca – the most prolific Italian weekly news magazine for illustrated reportage in postwar Italy – during the last phase of Italian colonialism (1950–60). The analysis focuses specifically on two photographic commemorations published on the twentieth (1955) and twenty-fifth anniversary (1960). The aim of this contribution is to examine these iconotexts in order to display how the interplay between images and words transmitted a selective and codified memory whose path mainly moved from nostalgia to pride while remaining characterised by a complete rejection of the feeling of shame. This representation was not even questioned by the references to those elements that will be considered, in the long-term, as evidence of the brutality of this colonial enterprise: those signals appear not to have been removed, but rather silenced and not truly comprehended, preventing the sense of shame from taking root in Epoca until 1995.