My Grandpa, the Fascist?
March 08, 2025 at 12:35AMIn this personal essay for New Lines Magazine, Stefania D’Ignoti uncovers her grandfather’s hidden past—and her Italian family’s history. While helping to declutter her mother’s parents’ home, she finds old photographs from her grandfather’s days as a soldier. D’Ignoti notices one detail: In each photo, he wears fascist military attire. She then learns that he settled in Libya in 1938, when the first wave of Italians arrived as part of Italy’s colonial project. Through family memories and historical research, D’Ignoti examines Italy’s largely forgotten campaigns of colonial violence and ethnic cleansing. “The Libyan case is possibly the most powerful example of what historians like [Libyan author Ali Abdullatif] Ahmida have called colonial genocide in North Africa,” she writes. D’Ignoti’s piece explores an overlooked chapter of world history and the challenges of confronting historical complicity.
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.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/07/my-grandpa-the-fascist/
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