Abstract: In 1923 Benito Mussolini inaugurated the ‘Museo Coloniale’ in Rome. It was not a classic ethnographic museum with scientific objectives and an evolutionary comparative approach. It was a colonial museum, planned to cover several functions, like to show African colonial dominions and colonial subjects to Italians, to narrate the colonial venture and the construction of an empire, to educate and transform Italians into colonisers. Closed for almost fifty years, since 2017 the heterogeneous collections of Museo Coloniale became part of the Museo delle Civiltà of Rome, a “museum of museums”. How to decolonize a museum established for celebrating colonialism? How to present and to communicate this collection as a national “cultural heritage”? How these colonial collections dialogue with objects of other sections of the Museo delle Civiltà, coming from worldwide? The contribution we are proposing has the aim of presenting and discussing the process of displaying the new section on which the Museo delle Civiltà is working on with a de-colonial perspective, reflecting on challenges and complexities of the future display as well its different aims. In particular, the presentation will develop two main topics: on one hand it will analyze and question the rheotic of propaganda displayed by the Museo Coloniale, on the other it will focus on how to give a public contribution – on a museological level – to the discussion on the Italian colonial past, against the public amnesia of this part of the nation’s history.
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