Abstract
Introducing a new Special section on the material legacies of Italian colonialism, this article takes the moves from the exhibition „Freed Art. Masterpieces Salvaged from the War, 1937–1947“, held in Rome in 2023, in order to highlight the ongoing deficiencies in Italy’s postwar memory of fascist-era spoliations of cultural heritage across Italy and especially in its former colonies. By combining the now established historiography on material culture with the growing field of colonial and post-colonial studies, it aims to show how the analysis of the signifying and re-signifying of colonial objects can prove particularly useful in deciphering the uses, abuses and „adaptive re-uses“ of the past in the broader context of post-1945 Italian history. By integrating the (post)colonial experience into the current debate on the role of cultural heritage in the Italian nation- (re)building process, the study takes an interdisciplinary approach, at the crossroads between history, art history and law, that focuses on different types of material culture (buildings, monuments, frescos, mosaics, plaques, street signs and other objects) from a variety of perspectives, including Ethiopia and Libya as well as Italy and especially its ‚peripheriesʻ.