I attended “Being Black in Venice” with Igiaba Scego and Shaul Bassi on October 18th and wow–that was one of the best two hours I’ve ever spent. It was a perfect addendum to the Race, Class, and Family in Contemporary Literature course (co-taught by Igiaba Scego), and it put a lot of things that we’ve covered in lecture into perspective. Coming into this semester, my conception of Italy was very narrow: I knew it as the land of the Renaissance, high fashion, pizza, pasta, and emotive, tan white people. The last facet was precisely why I never foresaw myself studying Italy or wanting to learn Italian in the first place; my work for the past several years has focused on the African diaspora (primarily in North and South America), but I never foresaw Italy as forming part of that narrative. However, after reading Adua, meeting Igiaba Scego for the first time, and listening to her and Bassi’s discussion, I realized that I was dead wrong. 

 Scego and Bassi opened the event with images of a black gondolier from the 15th century “Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Rialto Bridge” painting and a black servant in another around the same period. A ways after, they spoke about Shakespeare’s famous 17th century tragedy Othello, which centers on the life of a Moorish military commander in Venice. Outside of fiction, they mentioned Alessandro de’ Medici–the biracial grandson of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who served as the Duke of Florence in the 16th century. It is evident from these four examples that black people have been in Italy for a long time and, before colonization, were thought of positively and occupied positions of power. 

The story after colonization changed. Black people were conspicuous in Italian artwork, but in demeaning ways–as slaves submitting to the degrading treatment of their white masters. While I viewed this imagery as normal for what colonial empires produced at the time, what utterly shocked me was the recreation of black people’s heads into doorknobs and chandeliers. These images elicited a visceral reaction from me because they showcased the lack of humanity with which black people were regarded; they weren’t treated as thinking, feeling human beings, but rather as props and decorations. Artwork made of their bodies, as well as their bodies, could be bought, sold, and exchanged as presents, but only one was considered beautiful. 

When taken together, all these representations contradict the construction of Italy as a white nation. People of African descent have been in the country for centuries and have contributed significantly to the artistic, economic, political, and architectural landscape. These images also refute the Italian motif of “brava gente.” If Italy was completely innocent in the European colonial project, then how can one explain the racist monuments and their normalization within Italian society? How can one explain the turmoil in Italy’s former colonies that have sent waves of African immigrants to its borders? And, how can one explain the harsh discrimination that these immigrants and their offspring experience while trying to define where they fit within the nation? Scego and Bassi’s talk raised many important questions and was an incredible step in the right direction with respect to Italians reckoning with their colonial past and present.