Bringing the Empire to the Provinces: Colonial Museums and Colonial. Knowledge in Fascist Italy

In Mussolini’s totalitarian state the colonial collections, displaying raw materials and natural history specimens as well as ethnographic collections, were part of wider political contexts; they provided comforting ideas of supremacy and control. Through them the Empire came to be understood by people less as something “out there”, and instead it came to have a palpable, material presence all over Italy. Through objects visitors were able to glean information about diverse people’s culture and climates, make assumptions about their relative positions in socio-evolutionary hierarchies, and justify their own political and economic subjugation of such people. The aim of this paper is to underline the existence of a dialogue between peripheries in which the transmission of materiality between the two has been shaping the colonial consciousness of the Italian people, beyond the fall of the fascist regime.