An old family album sent me on a journey through Italy’s dark past in Libya
Stefania D’Ignoti
On a humid August afternoon last summer, I helped my mother unpack the boxes of her parents’ home, the decluttering of which we had put off for years.
I was only 9 when my maternal grandfather Alfio Leotta, a retired bus driver, died at the age of 82; his wife, my grandmother, passed away three months after my high school graduation in 2012. Their home, located in a once-wealthy neighborhood of Catania, Sicily’s second-largest city, still contained all of their belongings, left untouched through the years.
While on a break from the selection of “toss” and “keep” items, a half-ripped family album caught my attention. I sat on the floor with my mom as we flipped through the pile of old black-and-white photos, expecting to find a handful of shots of her and her brother as children, or some from my grandmother’s golden youth.
What we found instead — spread over more than six pages — was a visual account of my grandfather’s days as a soldier in Libya. The photos were fairly mundane — here he was, looking out over the corniche in Tripoli, or petting a camel — except for one detail that caught me off-guard: In each photo, he was wearing typical fascist military attire.
“I thought you knew grandpa fought in Libya,” my mom said. I suddenly had flashbacks to my childhood, sitting at the dinner table while grandpa fed me bread and ricotta salata, a kind of hard, salty cheese ubiquitous in my city.
As I ate, he would spend hours telling me about this other “Italian coast” he lived on for a while, where he fought alongside German soldiers during World War II. I was too young back then to understand or even remember. But seeing those photos triggered my memory of random words, such as “Tripolitania” and “Cyrenaica,” which I later learned, while a university student of Middle Eastern studies, refer to geographical regions of modern-day Libya.
When my mom and I picked up some of the photos, we found handwritten notes hiding behind them, mostly locations and dates, some stretching back to 1938. “But that’s way before the war began,” I told my mother as we both looked puzzled. In his tales, grandpa had always told us that he was conscripted to fight in Libya — where the Nazi and fascist troops fought against the Allies for control of North Africa — and was stationed there when he was just 19. But apparently that wasn’t his first tour on the southern Mediterranean coast.
I came back from that unpacking day disoriented and nursing a sense of dread, but curious to understand more about my grandfather’s prewar presence in Libya. Growing up, Italian colonialism had always been a kind of footnote; at school we were simply taught we occupied Libya in 1911 after taking it from a collapsing Ottoman Empire, with the hope of leveraging newfound, if belated, colonial power to catch up with France and the British Empire in the scramble for Africa — and that we succeeded at that, until World War II dealt a blow to our campaign. But that’s about it. After 1945, there’s no mention of the occupation, nor of its impact on the local population.
I took the photo album with me, and the more I researched and asked around, the more I discovered that Italy’s colonial past in Libya had always been within my family, and everywhere around me, but hiding in plain sight. From my parents’ best friends — who were born and raised in Libya, but for years avoided mentioning it — to my dentist’s announcement that he would take a one-year leave to teach at a dentistry college in Libya, in Italian and visa-free, with an annual salary triple the local average, I suddenly realized how meaningful it was for me to face the microcosm of my family’s turbid past.
This reckoning seems especially urgent as, two generations later, my country witnesses a dismal fascist setback under Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government. These days, zapping through Italian TV channels seems like a journey through dystopia. A new, critical TV show about the foundation of fascism just premiered to loud plaudits from pro-fascists, while newscasts of RAI — Italy’s state channel, which Meloni’s government openly controls — barely mentioned the latest neo-fascist commemoration in Acca Larentia, where hundreds gathered making Roman salutes. They were interrupted by a lone protester who was jailed for saying “Viva the Resistance.”
But I never thought I would find that skeleton in my own home’s closet. I wonder how many other Italians are similarly naive about the pasts of their families and communities — pasts that we are now being encouraged to glorify.
The project of Italian settler colonialism in Libya is still fairly obscure, even within the country. Italy joined the rush to conquer a share of the African continent centuries after many of its European counterparts. In history books, Italians — including soldiers — are always defined as “brava gente” (“good people”).
The widely accepted myth describes them as harmless, innocent and at times even cluelessly naive, as a way to whitewash the country’s war crimes and contrast them with those of other European powers, particularly during colonial times. But like Italy’s brutal campaigns in Ethiopia and Somalia, the invasion of Libya was actually ruthless.
“Italy looked at Libya as the ‘fourth shore,’ an extension of Italy, much like the French treated Algeria,” Libyan author and professor Ali Abdullatif Ahmida argues in his book “Genocide in Libya.” His research has revealed that Italy’s colonial goal was to settle between 500,000 and 1 million Italians in the fertile Green Mountain areas in the east of the country, especially landless peasants from central and southern Italy, like my ancestors.
Settlers, however, encountered widespread local resistance to their project, a detail hardly ever mentioned in Italian school textbooks. When the fascists under Benito Mussolini arrived in 1922, they came with an even more vicious plan: replacing the local population with settlers.
In his research, Ahmida uncovered that Italian settlers built several concentration camps in the desert of Sirte where about 100,000 Libyans were confined. They were mostly those who resisted Italy’s colonial project; but many were also simple civilians with their herds who had to be forcibly removed to clear the land and make space for the incoming settlers. The first wave of 20,000 Italian settlers arrived in 1938. That’s the year my grandpa arrived in Libya, too. Did that mean he was one of them?
About two-thirds of imprisoned Libyans died in concentration camps. This brutal chapter of history has never been tackled within my family, nor collectively as a nation. The widespread lack of self-awareness and academic research on the matter has made it difficult for Italy to come to terms with its colonial crimes. If anything, Italy’s rhetoric since the end of the war and of colonialism has been that Italians themselves were victims of fascism and German Nazism.
My mom was completely unaware of this part of our country’s history; she never wondered why her father spent time in Libya, nor did she ever question it. One afternoon we sat down again over a cup of coffee, and we started connecting the dots in a family quest to understand our past and, we hoped, to make peace with it.
While revisiting her childhood memories of time spent with her own grandfather, Giusepe Leotta, my mother recalled that he spoke fluent Greek.
“How come?” I asked her. “He was a carabiniere [member of the Italian national police force] in Rhodes, a Greek island. Didn’t you know that part of Greece used to be Italian?” she told me.
Of course I didn’t, because no one ever spoke about it, neither at school nor at home.
In an attempt to increase its power in the Levant, in 1911 Italy also occupied the Dodecanese islands, which under Mussolini later became the testing ground for another project of Italianization of the area. By 1940, thanks mainly to a resettlement program, about 25% of the population was Italian. A brutal police force was sent there to “protect” the settlers and their property. My great-grandfather served in that police force.
Through my mom’s fading memories and her older brother’s help, we were able to discover that it was my great-grandfather, motivated by the fascist propaganda of the time — which spurred Italians to reconquer lands once part of the Roman Empire — who pushed his son, my grandfather, to set out for Libya. Just like his father, grandpa joined the colonial security forces for what he saw as protecting settlers and “taming” rebels on another Mediterranean coast.
The settlers believed that since Libya used to be part of the Roman Empire, they were simply reclaiming a land that was their birthright. (The echo of this in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not lost on me.) The idea of reviving Roman Africa was an integral part of the propaganda to justify colonization. Although the Italian fascists’ experiment in colonialism ended in 1943, when they were defeated by the Allies in World War II, many settlers stayed and more followed, continuing to settle until well into the 1970s.
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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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