Obelisks and triumphal arches

Benito Mussolini unveiled ancient Rome: the temples, tombs and public spaces buried beneath the modern city. By clearing medieval neighbourhoods and “liberating” ancient buildings, such as the Mausoleum of the emperor Augustus, the Duce claimed a Roman legacy for his Fascist project; ancient Rome also inspired the stark arches, ancient motifs and Latin inscriptions of his state architecture. Mussolini even built his own “forum” to the north of the city, the sports complex that today hosts both the Roma and Lazio football teams. “Foro Mussolini” has been renamed “Foro Italico”, but it boasts its original mosaics and marble athletes, and at the entrance a jagged modern obelisk erected in 1932 still stands 17 metres tall. A monolith of Carrara marble, the largest ever extracted, it is inscribed in Latin MUSSOLINI DUX.

The reference back to ancient Rome’s obelisks is obvious – but as Samuel Agbamu explains in his excellent Restorations of Empire in Africa, there’s another layer of meaning too. The ancient obelisks of the city of Rome were imperial loot, transported to the metropolis after Augustus annexed Egypt as a province in 30 BCE to complete a band of Roman territory running all across North Africa. The modern obelisk positioned the young Italian nation as Rome’s rightful heir in this respect as well, part of a wider project to make Italian imperialism in Africa “a modernizing return of the Roman empire”.

The book is a huge achievement, an immensely detailed and sophisticated exploration of sources over the whole period of Italy’s imperial endeavours in Africa from the 1860s to the 1930s – from literary texts, sculpture and films to public architecture, inscriptions and political speeches – that reveal modern Italy’s relationship to the Roman past.

Empire came late to Italy. The story starts soon after unification in 1861 with small settlements on the Red Sea that were incorporated as the Italian colony of Eritrea in 1890. Attention then turned to the Ottoman provinces of North Africa, and in 1911 the Italian army seized new colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the Turks.

Agbamu’s exploration of the romanità that already distinguished this period of Italian imperialism emphasizes the ideological continuities between liberal and Fascist Italy. On the one hand it was empire in Africa that allowed Italy to achieve a truly national identity, with the creation of an Italian “us” in the face of a foreign “them”; on the other, “the idea of the nation … uses the Roman Empire in Africa as the laboratory for its articulation”. In particular, the new African empire could heal or at least obscure the vast crack that split the young Italian nation into a prosperous north and an impoverished south, whose inhabitants were often mocked as African themselves – a perspective captured in the popular Torinese saying that “Garibaldi did not unite Italy, but divided Africa”. (It had a long tail: when I checked into a hotel in Rome after spending the summer of 1997 excavating in Basilicata in the deep south, the receptionist looked up in horror at my accent and asked “Did you learn your Italian from the monkeys?”)

Giovanni Pastrone’s silent epic Cabiria (1914) captures Africa’s role in Italian nation-building, even though the film is set 2000 years before the Italian nation came to exist. The eponymous heroine is a Sicilian girl captured by Phoenician pirates. They sell her for child sacrifice at Carthage, an ultra-modern city pulsating with orientalizing iconography ranging from Assyrian to Aztec (and which became a model for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927, as well as the Indiana Jones franchise). Cabiria is eventually rescued from her Semitic captors by a mildly heroic Roman general with the help of his Nubian slave Maciste, who has equally happily been freed from Carthaginian into Roman servitude, before Cabiria and the general fall in love on the boat back to Italy. Any concerns about the affiliation of the south dissolve in romance and Roman glory.

The area around Tripoli was quickly subdued, but the conquest of Cyrenaica was only fully pursued by the new Fascist regime after the March on Rome of 1922. Chemical weapons were deployed at scale, and in 1929 two-thirds of the civilian population was deported to concentration camps that echoed the layout of Roman army camps. In 1934 Italy united its North African possessions into a new colony of “Libya”, and in March 1937 a great arch in the Roman triumphal tradition was erected over a new Italian road along the arid coast from Tripoli to Benghazi. Discussed in detail by Agbamu, it commemorated the Philaeni brothers, ancient heroes who won a race to extend Carthaginian territory against the claims of the Greek city of Cyrene and who died as a result; the arch carries sculptures of them twisted in agony. It was destroyed by Ghadafi in the 1970s, but Agbamu describes how the arch had not simply exploited an ancient memory, but had demonstrated how much had to be forgotten – above all, the awkward detail that the Philaeni were sons of Carthage, Rome’s greatest enemy, but reinvented here as “a metaphor for the sacrifice expected of every fascist”.

Six months after the Arch of the Philaeni was constructed, one last African obelisk was erected in Rome, outside the Ministry of Italian Africa. In 1936 Italy had occupied Ethiopia, where Roman soldiers had never trod. All the same, Mussolini equated this victory with Augustus’ over Egypt and presented it as a continuation of Rome’s mission. The 24-metre monument – uprooted by Italian troops from a whole series of such structures in the ancient Ethiopian capital of Axum and transported in three pieces – made that case in the city of Rome itself. As early as 1947 the postwar Italian government agreed to send it back, but this had not yet happened when lightning struck in 2002, causing a great deal of damage due to the steel bars inserted to patch it back together. It was repaired, finally returned in 2005 and re-erected alongside its comrades in 2008.

Josephine Quinn is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford

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