Material Histories of Italian Colonialism

This is the second of two international conferences: Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana, December 4-5, 2025) and New York (Italian Academy, March 26, 2026).

Italian museums and private homes hold a substantial number of objects intertwined with the history of colonialism. Their conservation raises questions about their cultural and political significance, alongside debates regarding their provenance and the practices surrounding their restitution. Furthermore, these objects still circulate widely — through auctions, marketplaces, and passed down through family inheritances. Despite this pervasive presence, the growing scholarship on Italian colonialism has not placed material culture at the center of analysis.

Indeed, although Italian colonial visual culture, exhibition history, and museum collections garner increasing scholarly attention, the objects themselves often remain on the margins of inquiry. Furthermore, no specific methodology has been developed for the study of colonial material culture, resulting in a gap in both historical and art historical research.

Bearing traces of their makers and owners, objects act upon bodily experience, affect, and emotions. Our aim is to address the production and circulation of colonial objects to understand their active role in shaping colonial imaginaries, visual culture, and imperial ideologies, and their contribution to the formation of tropes surrounding race, gender, class, and nationhood, both in Italy and abroad. Focusing on the dialectical relationship between the facture of objects and the meanings they produce, we are thus interested in exploring how colonial objects shape memories and ideas, and how their circulation during colonial rule as well as their current preservation yield insights into the negotiations of colonial legacies by colonizers and colonized subjects alike.

These two conferences originate from a collaboration among the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture of the Weddigen Department of the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History, the Contemporary History section of the German Historical Institute in Rome, and the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, with the generous support of the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities.
Co-sponsors:
Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma
Bibliotheca Hertziana
Ragusa Foundation

Organizers:
Carmen Belmonte (Università degli Studi di Padova/Bibliotheca Hertziana - MPI; former Fellow at the Italian Academy)
Laura Moure Cecchini (Università degli Studi di Padova)
Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University; former Fellow at the Italian Academy)
Bianca Gaudenzi (Libera Università di Bolzano/Wolfson College, University of Cambridge)

Image: Alberto Salietti, On the desk, 1946, oil on plywood, private collection. Courtesy Il Ponte Casa d’Aste

Visit to read more about this and other events, and all our initiatives.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Italian Academy of Columbia University