Traces of Italian colonial past

This Italian colonial passport, issued by the government of Italian Somalia symbolizes the lingering traces of the Italian Colonial past in the contemporary world. During my childhood in a small town in Northern Italy’s Veneto, I got to know many people from my tight-knit community in my hometown thanks to my father’s profession. Amongst the older people a handful shared an interesting communality, their curios birthplace. While helping my father sort medicinal recipes I stumbled on birthplaces such as “Tripoli”, “Derna”, “Asmara” and “Mogadishu”. My father patiently explained to me that these cities once belonged to Italy, but in my childhood thoughts I could not make sense of these people’s whiteness and their birthplace in Africa. It was only years later (at school/university) that I learned about Italy’s colonial past, with all its violence and enduring consequences. By then the people from my community born in the former colonies were gone and I never got the chance to ask them about their experiences. Nevertheless, the passport is a reminder about the simultaneous presence and absence of the memory of colonial borders in a small town in north-eastern Italy at the beginning of the 2000’s.