An old family album sent me on a journey through Italy’s dark past in Libya
Stefania D’Ignoti
Giovanna Giunta, 59, my mother’s colleague at the elementary school in Catania where they both teach, told me she still remembers the patio and arabesque elements of her sun-kissed house in Tripoli.
Her grandparents were from Catania and Syracuse in Sicily, and their families left Italy to settle Libya in 1912, with the promise of a more prosperous life. All of her family, including her parents, uncles and cousins were born and raised in Libya.
“It was just like growing up in any other region of Italy,” Giunta told me when I asked about her memories of Libya. “We would only socialize among us Italians. We would not play with Arab kids, our parents wouldn’t allow that. We would not learn their language, unless it was strictly for work reasons.”
She said her father, who worked at the American military base, was the only member of the family to have learned Arabic fluently, as he needed it to work with “unskilled Libyan laborers.”
Libya gained its independence in 1951, a few years after Great Britain and France briefly took control of it at the end of World War II. Through a 1956 agreement, Italy granted Libya a sum of money as compensation for war damages and relinquished all Italian state properties to the new state of Libya. That economic settlement allowed, for a brief time, the recognition of Italian descendants of settlers and gave them the right to stay in the country. This status remained in effect until, in 1970, Moammar Gadhafi announced the confiscation of all of their assets and their expulsion, without paying them any compensation. In fewer than three months, more than 14,000 Italians were forcibly repatriated.
After a lifetime in Libya, on Oct. 7, 1970, Giunta and her family were among them. She was only 5 years old, but she still remembers everything about this traumatic moment of her life. “We were only allowed one suitcase each,” she recalled. “Then we were taken by a boat that brought us to Naples, where we lived in a refugee camp for almost two months. We were like refugees, like the ones we now see on TV. We didn’t deserve such harsh treatment.”
It’s a hardly tackled topic, almost whispered when mentioned, but among older generations, Libya is remembered with a mix of pride and hatred. According to several “Italians of Libya” — as those who were expelled have been labeled — their treatment was unfair. But to Libyans, it was a natural response to their colonization.
Francesca Ricotti, president of the Rome-based Association of Italians Repatriated From Libya, which today has some 400 members, told me that the way Italians were evicted was uncivilized, unjustified and brutal. The Italians had to leave all their possessions and take only limited sums of money with them. “The Italian government did very little to protect our interests and dignity, demonstrating excessive initial compliance, which Gadhafi took for weakness,” she said.
In Italy, they were despised, seen as immigrants bearing a shameful history the country rigorously tried to cover up. And, she said, their former “neighbors” were no better. The Libyans “unjustly considered us colonizers, but we weren’t. We were encouraged by our government at the time to take on an opportunity to live a better life. We were a peaceful community living in harmony with locals. We stayed there not because fascism motivated us to do so, but because we lived well there,” she added.
When I confronted her with the question of whether their group feels any guilt, since their presence was part of a genocidal project and an unwanted presence that locals fought against, she answered: “In the 1920s, Libya was a poor country, there was no water and agriculture was still primordial. By the time the Italians repatriated, it had become one of the most advanced countries in the Mediterranean: It had cities that had nothing to envy the Italian ones. We may have done some bad things, but we also contributed positively to the country’s development.”
In Italy, as in many former colonizing nations, including France and Great Britain, this argument remains the mainstream narrative. The colonial period is viewed with nostalgia, tinged with undertones of victimhood and not examined for its brutality.
With the fragmentation of Libya post-2011, Italy has attempted to recover its influence in the Mediterranean through its former colony, initially as part of a larger European Union plan to exploit the country for migration control purposes. More recently, under Meloni, a pact of understanding and mutual friendship has de facto restored ties between the two countries. Libya receives millions of dollars to keep migrants away from Italian shores while allowing Italian companies, including those in the oil and gas sector, to profit from Libya’s resources.
And in a post-Ghadafi Libya, even the Italian settlers who were expelled in the 1970s have recently gained the right to return to the country as they please — though only as visitors. Many have done so, without a whiff of self-consciousness as they rearrange their own memories. Both the Ricotti and Giunta families have visited or are planning to do so, their elder members having longed to return even while on their deathbeds.
In 1951, Libya’s population was about 1.5 million. Ahmida’s research and the data he presents in his book document what amounts to an Italian ethnic cleansing campaign, which may have decreased the local population by up to 10%. Compared with the troubled colonial legacies of other European powers, Italian colonialism in Libya and the violence that made it possible have received very little scrutiny.
The Libyan case is possibly the most powerful example of what historians like Ahmida have called colonial genocide in North Africa. Despite this, it has been ignored for close to a century. Research at a state level has been made nearly impossible: Ahmida details his attempts to access the colonial archives in Libya only to be rebuffed, and even the records of the Association of Italians Repatriated From Libya have fallen victim to Italy’s propensity to manipulate historical documents after the fact. Italian society, with few exceptions, still refuses to confront the horrors of its colonial period, especially in Libya.
I will never know if my grandfather and his father realized the magnitude of their complicity in Italy’s colonial dreams. Throughout the month of January, leading up to Holocaust Memorial day, the Italian commercial broadcaster Mediaset — founded by the late media tycoon and center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — aired short segments of its “Viva la Memoria” documentary project during commercial breaks. The project, in which descendants of Nazi concentration camp survivors recount the stories of their parents and grandparents, is a noble one. But the collective amnesia about other concentration camps — particularly those made by Italians — worries me in this political atmosphere.
And I can’t help but wonder if my grandfather ever felt guilty about his presence as a settler in Libya. After all, he was just a kid when he landed in Tripoli, and never made the mistake of returning after 1945.
But thinking back to his dinner-table tales when I was a child, I don’t remember him ever showing signs of regretting his Tripoli days. In his stories, he was the liberator of the “benighted” Libyans, and his enthusiastic tone made it seem like he even had lots of fun by the beach, eating couscous and riding camels.
My mom assured me that he was a good man who would have never killed anyone in Libya, but I’m aware that just being physically there meant complicity in an attempted genocide. For later generations to refuse to acknowledge such complicity is part of the problem.
I find great irony in the fact that, after the war, he chose to marry my grandma, Josefina Almerares, the daughter of Spanish refugees who fled Andalusia to escape Francisco Franco’s 1936 coup and the fascism that ensued, before finding themselves under a different type of right-wing dictatorship in Sicily.
Perhaps it was an unconscious decision taken out of love, or maybe embracing a refugee of a fascist dictatorship was a way to atone for his past. I will never get to settle all these questions in my head; that is why it is important to have these conversations within the walls of our own homes, before the last living witnesses of that time disappear. The historical revisionism that persists today is a challenge for the future.
During my last checkup, my dentist asked me, as someone who’s traveled extensively throughout the Arab world, if he should accept the position he was offered in Libya. “I’m guessing it’s a wild place to be living in,” he told me with a paternalistic, condescending tone. “But I also don’t want to deprive those less fortunate of receiving a good education. It’s our duty to educate them.” And I realized there’s still a long path ahead in decolonizing the Italian, and overall Western, mindset.
As I put my family photo album back where I found it, I started weighing the idea that maybe one day I might also travel to Tripoli on one of ITA Airways’ newly established daily flights. I’d like to track down the places where I saw my grandfather and his companions posing in those photos, walk what I imagine could have been his daily route along the corniche — but do so, I hope, aware of what my presence as an Italian means on that same pavement. Even if it’s a short trip, I’ve got some heavy baggage. But I’d like to lighten the load for my grandpa, and myself.
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Stefania D’Ignoti is an award-winning independent journalist covering conflict, migration and the rise of the far right.
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