Italy Confronts its Colonial Past
The power of Obelisks as urban signifiers, the evolution of a museum, and the transformation of a building from colonial headquarters to UN agency.
We were walking past the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) building and passed the site where the Stele of Axum—also known as the Obelisk of Axum—once stood. Every time I pass the sight I am reminded of its presence. In the year (1991-1992) that I lived on Piazza Epiro while I was teaching at Notre Dame, I would take the bus back and forth from Porta Metronia to Largo Argentina. The bus ride was an amazing tour each day that took me past the Baths of Caracalla, the Circus Maximus—you can see the Colosseum in the distance— the Temple of Vesta, the Forum Boarium, up past the Theater of Marcellus and the Campidoglio, the Victor Emanuel Monument and through Piazza Venezia, the Gesu, and then to Largo Argentina. Between the Baths of Caracalla and the Circus Maximus is the building that houses the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO. In front of this building stood from 1937 to 2003 the 33 meter tall Stele from Axum, Ethiopia. I learned then that this was a relic of Italy’s colonial past and was impressed when I learned that it had been returned by Italy with the help of UNESCO.
The story of how the Stele came to Rome is the story of Mussolini’s desire for empire—a painful chapter in Italian history which has taken years to confront—and it is a lesson in how objects can be used and misused. It is the story of Italy’s tortured past with Ethiopia and Eritrea.
After Italian unification in 1861, Italy wanted to establish a colonial empire to cement its great power status. Their occupation of coastal Eritrea brought Italian interests into direct conflict with those of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). On January 26, 1887 a battalion of 550 men (mostly Italians, including 22 officers, and a few Eritrean Askari) under Lieutenant Colonel Tommaso De Cristoforis were sent to reinforce the Italian garrison at Saati. The Italians were outnumbered 14 to 1 and eventually exhausted all their ammunition. Nearly all were killed.
Italians felt that the battle of Dogali was an insult to be avenged, and then started to attack Ethiopia to get revenge. In the interim:
“This was eventually followed by the Italy-Ethiopian War of 1887-1889, in which Italy occupied the Ethiopian territory in present-day Eritrea, founding the colony of Italian Eritrea’ . . the disputed Treaty of Wuchale led to the first Italy-Ethiopian War between 1895 and 1896 where the Ethiopians (supported by Russia and France) successfully fought off European expansion. The peace of Addis Ababa after the defeat of the Italian troops in Adua in 1896, was the beginning of Ethiopian independence.”
The history of the monument itself is told on the website of the city of Rome:
“The obelisk and its twin, now in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, have a similar history to the twin obelisks in Piazza della Rotonda and Villa Celimontana. These two were originally erected in Heliopolis and were later transported to Rome to adorn the temple of Isis. This one bears inscriptions dedicated to the Sun god, is made of red granite and its present height is over 9 meters. It was the last (obelisk) to be found (in Rome). The top was discovered by chance in 1719, during work on the foundations of the Casanatense Library. It was not until 1883 that the commission, set up immediately after the unification of Italy to carry out systematic excavations in the capital, discovered the entire obelisk.
It was immediately recognized that it came from Heliopolis and related to the other obelisk that had already been discovered and brought to Florence. In 1885 war broke out between Italy and the ancient Kingdom of Ethiopia and during the fighting, 548 Italian’s lost their lives in an ambush at Dogali. It was then decided to erect the obelisk in memory of the mournful event, on the squares in front of Termini Station, decorating the base with lions and bronze tablets with the names of the fallen soldiers. The ceremony took place on 5 June 1887.
It was 33 years later, in 1924, following a redevelopment of the Termini square, that the obelisk was moved to the gardens on the side of Via del Terme di Diocletian, where it can be seen today.”
The fascination with obelisks has a long history both in urban design.
Pope Sixtus V (Pope 1585-1590) began the modern use of obelisks in Rome to mark significant nodes in the city including the obelisks in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, Piazza del Popolo, the Esquiline obelisk which was re-erected outside of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Lateran obelisk.
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In the years following, additional obelisks were found amongst the ruins and re-erected at significant nodes so that Rome could become as it was in ancient days—the city with the most obelisks outside of Egypt. This had its origins in Augustus’ love of Egypt and his visit to the ancient abandoned city of Heliopolis after he had conquered Egypt. He had ordered the first set of obelisks brought to Rome. Subsequently, Roman emperors commissioned obelisks for Roman projects to be made in Egypt. We were very lucky to have an Italian Fellow at the Academy this fall who is an expert on obelisks and the relationship of ancient Egyptian culture to that of ancient Roman culture. It was he who first alerted me to the Dogali Monument—which in its current location seems to be hiding in plain sight.
The original location of the Dogali Monument in front of Termini, Rome’s great railroad station, seems very appropriate as it was this rail connection that was the beginning of the new “all roads lead to Rome” and thus to Ethiopia.
The “Ethiopian Adventure” of the 1880s had been a failed attempt for the newly unified state of Italy to secure its place on the world stage. Benito Mussolini who had come to power in 1922/3 was determined to avenge this loss:
“Following World War I and the rise of Italian Fascism, the Abyssinia Crisis began, and eventually culminated in the 1935-1936 Second Italy-Ethiopian War. Ethiopia was invaded in 1935 by the Italian troops, who reached Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936. It was a brutal conflict: the Ethiopians used prohibited dum-dum bullets and began mutilating captured soldiers (often with castration) since the first week of the war, while the Italians used chemical warfare. Ethiopia lost its independence and became Italian Ethiopia, part of Italian East Africa.”
During the 1930’s Mussolini was engaged in a wholesale reorganization of the city of Rome, carving huge boulevards through the city both to facilitate mass military parades and to reveal the backdrop of imperial Rome that had become hidden behind centuries of later construction. Some of my earlier posts that have touched on this including the one on the Mausoleum of Augustus and Ridolfi’s project for the Via dei Fori Imperiali.
It was another project that Ridolfi was involved in that was to provide the setting for the “Obelisk of Axum” that I passed on the bus. The project was to create a new headquarters for Italian Africa.
This “obelisk” is more properly termed a stele:
“Or in local languages, Tigrinya: hawelt; and church Ge’ez: hawelti - is found with many other stelae in the city of Axum in modern day Ethiopia. The stelae were probably carved and erected during the 4th century CE by subjects of the Kingdom of Aksum, an ancient Ethiopian civilization. Erection of Stelae in Axum was a very old practice. Their function is supposed to be as “markers” for underground burial chambers. The largest of the grave markers were for royal burial chambers and were decorated with multi story false windows and false doors. . . The last stele erected in Axum was probably the so-called King Ezana’s Stele, in the 4th century CE. . .
The Italian occupation of Ethiopia ended in 1937 with looting, in which King Ezana’s obelisk of Axum was taken to Italy as war booty. The monolith was cut into three pieces and transported by truck along the tortuous route between Axum and the port of Massawa, taking five trips over a period of two months. It traveled by the ship “Adwa,” arriving in Naples on March 22, 1937. It was then transported to Rome, where it was restored, reassembled, and erected on Porta Capena square in front of the Ministry . . . The obelisk was officially unveiled on October 28, 1937 to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the March on Rome.”
The March on Rome was an organized mass demonstration and the coup d'état in October 1922 which resulted in Mussolini’s National Fascist Party ascending to power.
Mussolini was very attuned to the use of physical symbols and it is interesting to note that a second looted item, a bronze statue of the Lion of Judah, was a symbol of the Ethiopian monarchy and was added to the Dogali Monument in a clear statement that the deaths of the Italians had been “avenged.”
In 1937 - 1938 Mussolini celebrated the 2,000 anniversary of the birth of Augustus. This exhibition was a multi-venue event that involved showing off the entire city of Rome as Mussolini was actively promoting a view of himself as a new “Augustus;” one aspect of which was his role as conquering emperor.
The central venue for the exhibition was the exhibition palace on the Via Nazioinale which was designed by Pio Piacentini in 1883 and was modified for the exhibition to express a more abstract idea of “Roman-ness.”
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In the guide book to the exhibition, which includes the image of the façade above, is a plate that celebrates the newly installed “Obelisk” of Axum:
The page explicitly compares the obelisk brought by Augustus to the Circus Maximus and reinstalled by Sixus V at Piazza del Popolo and the Obelisk of Axum. The photo used of the Axum Obelisk must have been from the recent inauguration and it appears that Mussolini is giving the fascist salute in the center. The caption makes clear that the “Obelisk” has been brought to Rome to commemorate the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.
With Italy’s defeat in World War II, Ethiopia regained its independence under Emperor Haile Selassie. In a 1947 UN agreement, Italy agreed to return the stele to Ethiopia along with other looted objects. The monument to the Lion of Judah was returned in 1967, but it took until 2003 to begin dismantling the stele. The project was completed and unveiled in September 2008.
Italy’s relationship to its fascist and colonial past is very complicated. As we have seen it is woven into the fabric of Rome and most Italian cities through the huge amount of architectural production during the Fascist reign.
Prior to the opening of the celebration of Augustus, Mussolini had already conceived plans for a World’s Fair to be held at a newly created Roman Quarter. The project known as E42 was started, but was of course never completed, and the fair was not held. However, much was built and in the years after the war the area was extended and the original fair buildings that had been built were repurposed. A museum of science was used to gather to gather a number of Roman Museums into a large “ethnographic and science museum” called the Museum of Civilizations. This museum reopened recently under the Directorship of Andrea Villani after having been closed for six years. I met Andrea the day after they celebrated its one year anniversary at a reception at the Academy for the Climavore Conference.
Andrea told me that among the twelve finalist interviewed for the position, he was the only artist. I visited the museum the following week and was impressed at how he is blending an artistic approach and rigorous museum practices to engage in a process (which he views as multi-year) of thinking about the future of a museum of this type.
You can read the director’s letter “What Civilizations?” in English or Italian.
In many ways the task is one of understanding and making evident the history of the collections as a way to own the responsibility for this history. It is impressive to know that a portion of the collection is in fact part of that “original” museum—that of Kircher in the Roman College of the Jesuits. The complex history of the collecting of artifacts from other cultures often without their consent is being tackled head on.
The modern museum is seen as beginning in a collection of antiquities and artifacts founded in 1651 here in Rome by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher at the Jesuit Roman College.
It is interesting that there is this direct connection to the Kircher Museum through the inclusion of part of the collection in the Museum of Civilization, but what I found most startling in connection with this post was the frontispiece from the 1678 edition of “Musaeum Celeberrimum Collegii Romani Societatis Jesu” by Giorgio de Sepi. The first work to describe the museum and its collections. This frontispiece shows the importance of obelisks in defining the space of the museum.
The most moving portions for me of the museum are the pieces dedicated to the Ethiopian question. There is a sculpture right at the entrance which has the Lion of Judah looking into the window of the Palazzo Venezia which had been Mussolini’s office—an explicit confrontation across time. The Ethiopian flag that had been taken by the Italians and written on is exhibited nearby.
In a larger exhibition inside the museum, paintings that were taken from the parliament building and not returned are displayed alongside a moving video of the return of the Axum Stele. The return of the Axum “Obelisk” is central to the exhibition as it the example of Italy making an effort to address this past. Interestingly the return of the Lion of Judah is not discussed.
All of this history involves the acknowledgement of a great deal of pain, but it is through understanding all of this history that we can better move forward.
Clearly, this is the new project of this institution. I love that upon walking into the museum you see a badly damaged model of the E42 which in its way testifies to the complexity of the location of the museum itself in a monument to Fascism.
To come back to the beginning, my bus rides past the Axum Stele, I would like to examine the other part of the composition—the building intended to house the Ministry of the Colonies in Africa:
“The building was designed in 1938 by Vittorio Cafiero, the designer of the city plan of Asmara, and Mario Ridolfi, one of the masters of Italian Rationalism, and was originally designated to be the seat of the Ministry of Italian Africa: this was named in 1937, the year of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the Ministry of the Colonies . . . The palace was still unfinished when Italy surrendered to the allies in September 1943. The construction works, now only directed by Cafiero, started again in 1947 and the building was supposed to host the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication. After the decision to assign the edifice to FAO, the building was enlarged and work was finished in 1952.”
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“The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security. It’s Latin motto, ‘fiat panis,’ translates to ‘let there be bread.’ It was founded on 16 October 1945.”
Now, of course, it is important to me to link things to food culture—I had known when I took those bus rides that the building was the FAO. What I did not know was the history of the building and the history of the FAO:
“The idea of an international organization for food and agriculture emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, advanced primarily by Polish-born American agriculturalist and activist David Lublin. In May-June 1905, an international conference was held in Rome, Italy, which led to the reaction of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) by the King of Italy, Victor Emanuel III.
The IIA was the first intergovernmental organization to deal with the problems and challenges of agriculture on a global scale. It worked primarily to collect, compile, and publish dats on agriculture, ranging from output statistics to a catalog of crop diseases. Among its achievements was the publication of the first agricultural census in 1930.
World War II effectively ended the IIA. During the war, in 1943, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a League of Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, which brought representatives from forty-four governments . . . To Hot Springs, Virginia. . .
The conference ended with a commitment to establish a permanent organization for food and agriculture which was achieved 16, October 1945 in Quebec City, Canada.”
In 1951, the FAO’s headquarters were moved from Washington, DC to Rome. The FAO website notes that this was fitting because the IIA had been headquartered in Rome. I am sure that there were many political calculations on top of this heritage, including the importance that Washington placed on Italy as a counterweight to Communism. Nonetheless, the importance Italy has always placed on its agriculture certainly has to have played a role. This is a country that is passionately interested in food.
I am grateful to know the history of the Axum Stele—I am only sorry that the base and some commemoration of its history on the site is not present. The presence of the Axum Stele is an important part of the history of Rome and should not be forgotten.
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POST SCRIPT
We were in the Vatican Museums on Saturday, and I was impressed to come upon a panel in the museum that noted in the most simple terms that Pope Francis had returned the three fragments of the Parthenon that had been in the Vatican collection to Greece earlier this year—the fragments are replaced by plaster casts. The story is present and the Pope in his quiet way is making a very political statement. The presence of the plaster casts make this evident.
Hans - Your knowledge and understanding of Italian architecture and history is amazing. In 1974 I spent a couple of months right across from the FOA staying at the monastery of the church of San Gregorio and I never had a clue about this story.
At the time there was an awful lot of Rome to explore, I guess that's my excuse. I had moved in with an old friend in his room at the monastery - part of his junior year abroad program. When he left I stayed in the room, eating some meals with the students and the monks eventually noticed I wasn't in any of the programs. I explained that I was an architecture student, studying Rome etc. They were so nice, saying that that was fine, I could stay, they just wondered who I was. I took that forever as an example of Italian hospitality, putting up another pilgrim.
Malcolm