Although forced to give up their colonial empire and their foreign policy ambitions (also) in the East, Italian intellectuals did not seem ready to give up what anthropologist Lidio Cipriani in his book *Dal capo al Cairo* defined as the Italians' "*doti innate*", namely the ability to triumph everywhere as explorers and conquerors (Cipriani 1932, 628). In fact, at the very moment of the fall of the colonial empire and the loss of the colonies, the Italian Orientalist school highlighted its complex relationship with colonialism and the difficulty in untangling one from the other.

While the changes taking place resulted in the prime exaltation of "local history" (see, for example, Tucci's almost obsessive reference to travellers from the Marche region, and from Macerata especially, such as Ricci and Beligatti, Giovanni Francesco da Camerino, Domenico da Fano, Gregorio da Lapedona, Tranquillo da Apecchio, Costantino da Loro, Floriano da Jesi, Ciriaco d'Ancona and himself: Tucci 1942b; Tucci 1947; D'Arelli 1998; Garzilli 2006), IsMEO did not give up celebrating "great Italians" such as Marco Polo (*Oriente Poliano* 1954; Tucci 1954) or the Venetian Niccolò Manucci (Tucci 1963).

In 1949 Tucci published *Italia e Oriente*, a volume entirely dedicated to the concept of rereading proto-Italian travellers in the East, with the aim of incorporating them into a national narrative. The path from the earliest to the most recent explorers of the East, culminating with Dainelli and Tucci himself, was traced back to Emperor Augustus and Prester John, via Giovanni da Pian del

63 "The Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East and the Library of the State are today undertaking the integral and scientific publication of the works of the greatest Italian travellers and the documents that shed light on the relations that our peoples had with the East, and entitling it after the glorious name of Ramusio. This publication will document the role played by Italy as a cultural intermediary between East and West and the importance of its unifying mission, which ideally corresponds to its reaching out into the sea like a bridge that joins the continents. The writings of our pioneers, who gave Europe news of the most remote civilizations, sought to understand their most secret characteristics, spread western sciences to the East and attempted artistic approaches, finally published in a dignified format and with a complete critical apparatus, will fully highlight the admirable activity of our race, which did not cause incomprehension among peoples or grab unjust privileges from labile powers, but cooperated humanistically in a spiritual encounter between East and West." FGG, "Il Nuovo Ramusio".

Carpine, Giovanni de' Marignolli, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti commercial agent of the Compagnia de Bardi, Antonio Pigafetta, Filippo Sassetti, the Vecchietti brothers, Jesuit Antonio Rubino, Pietro Della Valle, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Lazzaro Papi and many more.

In the introduction to the volume Tucci wrote:

Dopo le grandi imprese coloniali e la prepotente espansione dell'Europa in tanta parte del mondo, e soprattutto in Asia, sembra che sia stata del tutto dimenticata la parte avuta dall'Italia, sia nello svelare i misteri dell'Oriente, sia nel diffondere in quelle terre il pensiero e l'arte dell'Occidente. Né sarà male in tempi così tristi come quelli che seguono una guerra perduta, quando non pure gli stranieri, ma gli stessi Italiani non risparmiano vituperi ed umiliazioni alla patria ferita, rievocare certe nobili opere dei nostri maggiori. Tanto più conviene farlo perché non si tratta di conquiste avventurose e rapaci, ma di un generoso e illuminato scambio di cultura, confortato da un vivo senso di umana comprensione; e difatti leggendo queste pagine si vedrà quanto ai nostri missionari e viaggiatori vada debitrice la conoscenza che l'Europa ha lentamente acquistato dell'Asia e come non poche siano le tracce che il pensiero, l'arte e la cultura italiana, e, attraverso l'Italia l'Occidente in genere, hanno lasciato in Oriente (Tucci 1949, iv–v).64

According to Tucci, Italy had never sought to obtain colonies in Asia with the desire to overpower them, but rather always moved with civilizing and generous intentions, unlike the other European powers (Scarfoglio 1937; Gnoli 1994, 226). It was a die-hard myth in the post-war period, fomented not only by the veteran officials of Italy's former African colonies (Del Boca 2005). Once again by presenting Italy as "mistreated" by the other European powers, Tucci intended to celebrate his country, defending it from the same Italians eager to forget its "noble deeds" accomplished all around the world.

Tucci did not abandon his celebratory intentions in the new Italian Republic and went on seeking continuity between the "Italians" of the past and those of the present.65 In an undated letter addressed to Giulio Andreotti (1919–2013),

leader of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party and three times prime minister, who himself authored the book *Un gesuita in Cina. 1552–1610: Matteo Ricci dall'Italia a Pechino*, Tucci wrote:

Le sono grato non per me ma per gli studi che coltivo e che in tal guisa, continuando una tradizione antica dal tempo del Desideri e del Beligatti, restano un privilegio degli italiani […] ciò naturalmente accrescerà, in Oriente, prestigio alla scienza italiana.66

IsMEO's activities continued even after the end of Tucci's presidency: from 1979 the institute operated under the leadership of Iranist Gherardo Gnoli (1937–2012), who later became the first president of the Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO), established after the unification of IsMEO with the Istituto Italo-Africano and active until 2012. Works celebrating Tucci's IsMEO and "his direct heirs" (Gnoli 1994) and the Italian presence in the East continued to be published by the institute (e.g. Menegatti 2005), alongside more technical works on the results of excavations and manuscript studies (Gnoli 1983).

Recently the acronym IsMEO has been taken over by the Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l'Oriente of Rome, which is often referred to as the "new IsMEO". The "new IsMEO" has also resumed publication of *East and West (New Series)*: "after almost a decade of silence, with this first issue of the 2020 Volume. This is exactly seventy years after Giuseppe Tucci, in his quality of president of IsMEO, began, with his *Foreword* contained in the first pages of the first issue of *East and West* 1 (1950), his dialogue between East and West".67 In 2019, the new institute also launched the publishing series *Il Nuovissimo Ramusio*.

Whether Tucci is still considered a "*paramanguru*" (Garzilli 2012, xxii) nowadays or not, his (and Gentile's) legacy remain alive and the rereading and resemantization of the works of Italian travellers and scholars in the East certainly continues.

#### Bibliography

*Asiatica*. 1941. "Saluto al Giappone" 7: 427–28.

*Catalogo dell'Esposizione Orientale.* 1877–1882. *Bollettino italiano degli studii orientali* n.s. 8–15: 212–59.

*L'Archiginnasio*. 1907. "Museo Indiano." 3–4: 156–7.

*La Nazione*. 1886. "Il Museo Indiano." November 16, 1886.

*La Nazione*. 1887. "Il Museo Indiano. Lo scoprimento dell'epigrafe a Filippo Sassetti e il discorso del De Gubernatis." March 15, 1887.

66 "I am grateful, not for myself, but for the studies that I foster and that in this way, continuing an ancient tradition from the time of Desideri and Beligatti, remain a privilege of the Italians […] this will naturally increase the prestige of Italian science in the East." Letter from Giuseppe Tucci to Giulio Andreotti in Garzilli 2012, II: 1028–1029.

67 IsMEO, "East and West" <https://www.ismeo.eu/east-and-west/> (2021-12-21)

Canella, Maria and Sergio Giuntini, eds. 2009. *Sport e fascismo.* Milano: FrancoAngeli.

De Gubernatis, Angelo. 1875. *Storia dei viaggiatori italiani alle Indie Orientali.* Livorno: Vigo.

De Gubernatis, Angelo. 1886. *Peregrinazioni Indiane.* Firenze: Niccolai.

De Gubernatis, Angelo. 1887. "La Società Asiatica Italiana ed il Museo Indiano. Primo resoconto." *Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana* 1: 8–14.

Della Valle, Carlo. 1931. *I pionieri italiani nelle nostre colonie.* Roma: Carlo Voghera.

De Rossi Filibeck, Elena. 2008. "Tibet: the 'Ancient Island' of Giuseppe Tucci." In *Images of Tibet in the 19th and 20th Centuries*, edited by Monica Esposito, vol. 1: 99-111. Paris: École française d'Extrême-Orient.

Di Giovanni, Antonino. 2012. "Giuseppe Tucci, l'IsMEO e gli orientalismi nella politica estera del fascismo." *Annali della facoltà di Scienze della formazione, Università degli studi di Catania* 11: 75–94. https://doi.org/10.4420/unict-asdf.11.2012.5

Ferretti, Valdo. 1995. *Il Giappone e la politica estera italiana 1935-41.* Milano: Giuffré.

Fiory Ceccopieri, Maria Raffaella, ed. 1981. *Dal Caucaso al Himalaya 1889-1909. Vittorio Sella fotografo alpinista esploratore*. Milano: Touring Club Italiano.

Formichi, Carlo. 1923. *Apologia del Buddhismo.* Roma: Formiggini.

Formichi, Carlo, and Salvatore De Carlo. 1942. *L'ora dell'India.* Roma: De Carlo.

Gabrieli, Francesco. 1993. *Orientalisti del Novecento.* Roma: IPO Nallino.

Garzilli, Enrica. 2012. *L'esploratore del Duce: le avventure di Giuseppe Tucci e la politica italiana in Oriente da Mussolini a Andreotti.* Milano: Asiatica Association.

Gentile, Giovanni. 1942*. "Giappone guerriero." Civiltà, rivista trimestrale della Esposizione Universale di Roma*, 21 gennaio [published in Gentile, Giovanni. 1991. *Politica e cultura*. Ed. Hervé A. Cavallera, vol 2: 182–89. Firenze: Le Lettere].

Neuhaus, Tom. 2012. *Tibet in the Western Imagination.* London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pastore, Alessandro. 2003. *Alpinismo e storia d'Italia. Dall'unità alla Resistenza*. Bologna: Il Mulino.

# Rereading Italian Travellers to Africa: Precursors, Identities and Interracial Relations in Narratives of Italian Colonialism

Fabrizio De Donno

**Abstract:** This essay considers a number of travellers' writings about Africa which are reread to construct and deconstruct Italian colonial identity. It focuses on Cesare Cesari's *Viaggi africani di Pellegrino Matteucci* (1932), which deems Matteucci a precursor of Fascist colonialism and contributor to Fascist "colonial science". The essay then moves on to explore the more recent rereading by Angelo Del Boca and Igiaba Scego of respectively Indro Montanelli's *XX Battaglione Eritreo* (1936) and Errico Emanuelli's *Settimana nera* (1961). By bringing together and rereading these texts, the essay maps the transformations of Italianness from colonial to postcolonial times and reveals how colonial identity relied on a series of gender, racial and sexual tropes of exploration and conquest.

**Keywords:** Africa, colonial identity, race, sex, gender

#### 1. Introduction

In the chapter entitled "Italian Travel Writing" of the *Cambridge Companion to the History of Travel Writing*, Nathalie C. Hester maps out the vast production of this genre by travellers from the Italian peninsula, in a trajectory leading from the texts of "medieval merchants" to "autobiographical texts by contemporary migrants" (Hester 2019, 206). I believe this trajectory to be a productive one, especially given the focus of this volume, as it points to insightful links in the production, transmission and *rereading* of travel writing associated with the Italian peninsula across the ages, and in the post-unification period in particular. Hester claims that this trajectory consists of three distinct phases, albeit with some continuity between them: the early modern stage, the post-unification stage and the contemporary stage. She finds continuity in particular in "the conditions of production and reception of Italian travel writing, currents that point less to philosophical or political consideration than to a notion 'capable of representing complex repertoires of allegiance, identity, and interest'" (206). Hester refers to the first stage as the cosmopolitan-humanist stage and includes writers from the pre-unification city-states, republics, duchies and kingdoms of the Italian peninsula working for their local courts or other European powers, such as Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone and Christopher

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Fabrizio De Donno, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>0000-0001-8465-587X

Fabrizio De Donno, *Rereading Italian Travellers to Africa: Precursors, Identities and Interracial Relations in Narratives of Italian Colonialism*, © Author(s), CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0.05, in Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (edited by), *Rereading Travellers to the East. Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Post-unification Italy*, pp. 65-82, 2022, published by Firenze University Press, ISBN 978-88-5518-579-0, DOI 10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0

Columbus. The cosmopolitanism of these authors, Hester goes on to say, is identifiable in "the duration and breadth of [their] itineraries and in the multilingual nature of their texts' transmission" (206). The humanist dimension, on the other hand, derives from the fact that early modern travel writers borrowed from the literary works of authors such as Dante, but especially Petrarch and Boccaccio, as they all "foreground travel and movement in their works, from the otherworldly allegorical voyage of the *Divine Comedy*, through the spiritual and geographical restlessness in Petrarch's poetry and letters, to the vivid tales of Mediterranean mobility in Boccaccio's *Decameron*" (208).1 As Italian humanism was based on the revival of classical antiquity, and it was "conceived as exportable and universally applicable" (208), Hester finds an element of cosmopolitanism here too, even though she does not address its Eurocentrism. The next stage identified by Hester is the post-unification period—the real focus of this essay and volume—when "attention to travel was part of the impulse to create a narrative of Italian identity and belonging" (216), including an Italian colonial identity. She mentions the growth in the production of travel texts, as well as biographies and histories of travellers from the Italian peninsula across the ages, who are *reread*—in essence, appropriated and "Italianized"—through the lenses of national identity and belonging, as well as colonial expansionism and foreign policy. As part of the trend of rereading earlier travellers, Hester mentions works such as Pietro Amat di San Filippo's *Biografia dei viaggiatori italiani* (1881), before moving to the Fascist period with the 18-volume series entitled *Viaggi e scoperte di navigatori ed esploratori italiani*, published by Alpes Publishing between 1928 and 1932. Interestingly, however, Hester tells us that cosmopolitanism returns to Italian travel writing in the last phase, especially through migrant autobiographical writings such as Salah Methnani and Mario Fortunato's *Immigrato* (1990), or the work of second-generation Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego who in her *La mia casa è dove sono* (2010) talks about "her hybrid cultural and linguistic identities" as well as "Italy's inability to acknowledge its colonial past" (220). This is the phase, in short, "when travel writing offers new ways of understanding Italianness as plurilingual, pluricultural and cosmopolitan" (220).

The distinctions as well as the claims of continuity in this trajectory are particularly useful as they invite reflections on how identitarian notions of Italianness (as well as Europeanness and Westernness) and cosmopolitanism alter across the different stages. Even more importantly, they point to how identities, allegiances and interests are transformed by the geopolitical dynamics of the changing times, which is a crucial element to consider in the rereading process. What Hester's discussion of cosmopolitanism does not account for, however, is the long genealogy of Eurocentrism in early modern and modern European

1 As Mary Watt (2017, 34–46) has shown, many travellers to the New World, and in particular Columbus, appropriated Dante's imagery of the netherworld to describe the topography and anthropology of the Caribbean.

travel writing.2 The question that arises here is: how do we approach the identity politics of cosmopolitanism throughout the three stages once we recognize that the notion of "cosmopolitanism" varies dramatically depending on whether the objective is self-aggrandizement (through essentialism) or genuine pluralism?

Columbus may well have been a cosmopolitan in that he wrote in Spanish and not Italian, and worked for imperial Spain rather than the Republic of Genoa. However, at the same time he wrote about the Caribbean in Eurocentric and essentializing ways (borrowing from the imagery of Dante's hell to construct a Caribbean otherness) that inspired the later production of Eurocentric (and racist) travel writings by other European nations, including Britain and France, and later on, post-unification Italy. Is it not striking, for instance, that in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matters campaigns the statues of travellers like Columbus were attacked to condemn western identity and racism against blacks as a legacy of European colonialism? And so we will see below how Columbus and other early modern explorers from the Italian peninsula were appropriated and Italianized in post-unification narratives of colonial explorations so as to turn them into the precursors of modern Italian colonial exploration.

Moreover, the rereading of earlier travellers, which often went as far back as the Roman times, also served the purpose of establishing traditions and continuity within "Italian" history between the ancient, medieval and early modern (city-) states of the Italian peninsula, and post-unification Italy. This "Italian" history was also used as a means to cultivate Italianness within modern Europeanness by emphasizing the central role of these "Italian" travellers as constitutive symbols of European colonial identity. The legacies of these earlier travellers were thus used in Italian post-unification narratives of colonial explorations to place the newly formed nation at the heart of European colonialism once more. Writing genealogies and traditions of "Italian" travellers thus became a powerful tool of colonial identity-building for the new nation as it sought a new place on the European and world stage. It is a process that would intensify under Fascism, with what has been called the mystique of the "precursors of fascist imperialism" (Chelati Dirar 1996, 29).

As I engage with Hester's overall trajectory, and focus on the series *Viaggi e scoperte di navigatori ed esploratori italiani*, I attempt to investigate the construction of these genealogies of exploration by placing the rereading of earlier travellers in the context of Fascist "*scienza coloniale*".3 I look at the last of the 18

volumes of the series—army general Cesare Cesari's *Viaggi africani di Pellegrino Matteucci* (1932)—and explore how Matteucci was not only turned into a heroic precursor of Fascist colonialism, but also situated in the great tradition of Italian travellers and explorers across the ages such as Columbus and Polo. I then place this and other rereadings of Italian travellers to Africa by Cesari in dialogue with the more recent postcolonial rereading of Indro Montanelli's *XX Battaglione eritreo* (1936) and Enrico Emanuelli's novel *Settimana nera* (1961) by Angelo del Boca and Igiaba Scego respectively, in which they address the amnesia of Italian colonial history and identity. I am interested in the transformations of Italian colonial consciousness from construction and celebration to postcolonial amnesia and shame: if Fascism reread travellers to appropriate and sacralize their enterprises and celebrate colonial identity, Del Boca and Scego's present-day, genuinely pluralist rereading of colonial travellers— as per Hester's last phase in her trajectory—can help us reconfigure how Italian colonial identity was constructed and existed in theory and practice, especially through racial, gender and sexual metaphors. We can also understand how it was then forgotten and replaced by the myth of "*Italiani brava gente*" (Italians [are] good people), until it resurfaced in the public consciousness, especially in contemporary expressions of racism in Italy.

## 2. Fascist genealogies of "Italian" exploration: *Viaggi e scoperte di navigatori ed esploratori italiani*

*Viaggi e scoperte di navigatori ed esploratori italiani*, populated with some of the most important exploratory efforts of figures related to the Italian peninsula, including Ludovico De Varthema, Antonio Pigafetta, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Niccolò de' Conti and Odorico da Pordenone, was one of the largest series of its kind to be published in Fascist Italy. The general editor of the series, Rinaldo Caddeo, was also author and editor of the first volume, which clarified the main purpose of the series. The aim was to emphasize the "primacy" of "Italian" explorers—mainly explorers from the medieval republics of the Italian peninsula, and especially those of Genoa and Venice—in passing their pioneering skills in the maritime, geographical and commercial sciences to the Portuguese, Spanish, French and British explorers, thereby shaping European colonialism (Caddeo 1928). Caddeo's production of works on Italian travellers was actually a momentary digression from his greater interest in the history of the Risorgimento—the Italian independence movement—the subject of his most original work, with texts such as *Uomini, vicende e tempi* (1931) and *Storia e critica* (1934). A nationalist of Mazzinian convictions and interventionist in World War I who contributed to the development of the idea of irredentism, Caddeo may have been put under pressure to edit this series by the regime, owing to the Fascist intensification of the "Italianization" of earlier explorers from the Italian peninsula. Indeed, Caddeo also edited the famous (and controversial) volume in the series by Fernando Columbus, Christopher's son, *Le historie della vita e dei fatti di Cristoforo Colombo*, first published in 1571, and already reissued several times before Caddeo's version (1930). In this edition, Caddeo spells out that the many critiques of the previous editions by American and other European scholars, in particular concerning Columbus's Italianness, were just out of "envy". As such, Caddeo sets out to restore the denied "authenticity" of the volume by Columbus' son, reclaiming "Italian" ownership of Columbus's achievements and visions, and using them to give impulse to the Fascist colonial campaigns. He writes: "*Colombo è nostro: l'evento che iniziò l'era moderna e diede una nuova fisionomia al mondo, è nostro*" (Caddeo 1930, lxvii–lxviii). It was not a note of exaggerated national pride, he goes on to claim, but defence of the historical truth from "foreign attacks". It is Fascist Italy, Caddeo concludes, that must make Columbus's work its own in its attempt to claim "il posto che le compete sotto il sole" (lxviii).4 Caddeo's claims – which placed the Italian citystates and their pioneering explorers at the root and heart of modern European imperialism, and were a way to make it up for the fact that post-unification and Fascist Italy were in actual fact *late participants* in the process – encapsulate the whole objective of the series: to provide new impulse to Fascism's late-1920s' resumption of Italian colonial campaigns and international relations. The emphasis here is not only on the appropriation of Columbus' enterprise as a way of legitimizing the Italian and Fascist "right" to imperialism, but also on stressing that the age when "Italian" explorers worked for "foreign" powers (what Hester calls the cosmopolitan age) was now over. Given that, for the greater part, the series intended to affirm the relationship between travel, exploration and colonialism, and given that Italian colonialism developed primarily in East Africa, I focus on Cesari's rereading of Pellegrino Matteucci as the greatest of the Italian travellers to Africa, placing him in the tradition of Columbus and other early modern and modern travellers from the Italian pre-unification states.

#### 3. From Matteucci to Cesari's Matteucci: geography, heroism and martyrdom

As one of the European pioneers in the exploration of the unknown parts of Africa in the 1870s and 1880s—the period that then became known as the "heroic" age of African exploration—Matteucci was an appealing symbol. Born in Ravenna in 1850, after dropping out of medicine, Matteucci studied Arabic, ethnography and the natural sciences on his own accord. He soon developed an interest in geographical exploration, and in Africa in particular. In 1875, he published a booklet entitled *La spedizione italiana all'Africa equatoriale* in order to persuade the newly established *Società Geografica Italiana* (hereafter SGI) to organize an expedition to equatorial Africa. In 1879, he embarked on his first expedition to Sudan and the kingdom of Gallas (part of contemporary Ethiopia) with Romolo Gessi, publishing a book entitled *Sudan e Gallas* about the experience (1879). Matteucci then participated in another expedition to Ethio-

4 "*Columbus is ours: the event which began the modern era and gave a new physiognomy to the world is ours* […] its due place in the sun" (italics original).

pia organized by the *Società d'Esplorazione Commerciale* in Africa, where he was asked to evaluate the potential for Italian commercial relations with Ethiopia. As a result of this expedition, he wrote *In Abissinia: Viaggio* (1880), in which he famously warned the Italian government that Ethiopia was not a suitable place for commercial relations with Italy, and therefore was not suitable for Italian colonialism (Matteucci 1880, 281).5 What made Matteucci famous worldwide, however, was his third expedition, in which he crossed Africa from the Red Sea to the Niger Delta together with Navy lieutenant Angelo Maria Massari, at the end of which he caught malaria and returned to Europe on an English ship en route from West Africa to England. He died in London in 1881. Matteucci wrote little about this last journey, which was tentatively reconstructed posthumously by another explorer, Giuseppe Dalla Vedova (1885).

Matteucci and the development of the discipline of geography were certainly central to the early post-unification attempts to get the Italian colonial campaign under way. As David Atkinson has discussed, the aggressive imperialism of the period spanning the 1860s to the 1880s saw a dramatic increase in interest in geography, with about 80 geographical societies springing up in every part of Europe (Atkinson 2005, 17). The practice of scientific geography included the "practical construction of colonial territory", as well as the transformation of abstract geographical imaginations into "legible, knowable places with their dimensions, topographies, and characteristics enshrined in cartography and scientific survey" (16). Indeed, due to colonialism taking centre stage in Mussolini's policies from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Fascism made an even greater commitment to the interdisciplinary field of geography in the colonial context (20). The director of the *Istituto Geografico Militare,* Nicola Vacchelli, also spelt out how geography could make a contribution to the developing field of "*scienza coloniale*", whose mission "entailed the collection, organization, and dissemination of all relevant knowledge about overseas territories to develop Italy's colonial consciousness, reinforce the colonial domain, and enable effective governance" (Atkinson 2005, 20).6 Luigi Federzoni, president of the SGI and former leader of the *Associazione Nazionalista Italiana*, was then made minister of the colonies, thus strengthening the link between geography and colonial expansionism even further.

Like Federzoni, army general Cesari was part of this colonial science network and collaborated with the *Istituto Coloniale Fascista*. Like some of the oth-

5 This is the statement by Matteucci in Italian, which I paraphrased in English: "in Abissinia, non conviene illudersi, la ricchezza è in potenza e non in *atto*, e se noi Italiani cerchiamo di guadagnare la fortuna in una prima impresa, possiamo cambiare via, perchè questo in Abissinia non è possibile".

6 Vacchelli himself wrote that this "colonial science" had to provide a profound and accurate knowledge of the geographical environments and the societies inhabiting them. In this sense, with the support of and in dialogue with disciplines such as botany, geology ethnography, anthropology, orientalism, and the political and economic sciences, geography would fulfil these criteria and provide the ultimate scientific basis for colonial and foreign policies (Vacchelli 1928, 159).

er volumes in the series, his rereading of Matteucci is an example of the attempt to revamp geography and construct a narrative (and a tradition) of "Italian" geographical and colonial exploration through the refashioning of past figures, symbols and identities—a narrative allegedly rooted in scientific rigour, and contributing to the wider objective of Fascist colonial science to persuade the Italians "to conceptualise themselves as an 'imperial people'" (Atkinson 2005, 24). However, while the choice of Matteucci may have been related to the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the explorer's death, there are two other reasons that made him particularly appealing to both Cesari and Federzoni: firstly, the idea of making a peculiarly Fascist celebration of a martyr of the *patria* who died for the "cause" of colonial exploration, as a precursor of Fascist colonialism, and a heroic symbol of explorational vigour; secondly, the need to urgently correct Matteucci's conclusion about the lack of any potential for commercial relations with Ethiopia, when Mussolini was already planning its occupation for the foundation of his empire in East Africa.

Given the context of geographical colonial science in which Cesari's rereading of Matteucci occurs, it is not surprising that the volume comes with a "preface" by Federzoni himself. Here Matteucci is celebrated with the typical liturgical and solemn language of Fascism which, as Emilio Gentile has famously shown, is often borrowed from Christian worship in order to sacralize political action (Gentile 1996). Matteucci thus becomes a heroic symbol of colonial exploration and an example of Fascist martyrology, rhetorically staging what Roger Griffin has termed the "palingenesis" of Fascism, or the national rebirth promised by Fascism, especially by exalting the suffering and sacrifices of the nation's heroes (Griffin 1993). Matteucci is remembered alongside the heroic travellers of the "past", including those that served foreign powers, with Fascism ensuring that from now on Italian colonial explorers would serve the Italian nation alone. Federzoni is the author of this identitarian rhetoric, stressing that Matteucci inaugurated a new chapter in the history of Italian exploration after the "loss" of the last of the Italian "grandi conquistatori per conto dello straniero", Pietro Sarvognan di Brazzà, "creatore del Congo francese" (Federzoni in Cesari 1932, xi). Federzoni completes his construction of Matteucci's "Fascist" identity by calling him a young hero, alluding to his tragic death and constructing the figure of the spiritual, heroic and patriotic martyr: he praises his "energie stimolatrici" and "supreme idealità umane" (Federzoni in Cesari 1932, xii),7 and compares him to other glorious patriotic heroes such as Goffredo Mameli or Ippolito Nievo who, like him, died "sul primo fiorire dell'ingegno e della fede", making them "spiriti" imbued with "una più pura luce di poesia e di eroismo" (xix).8

7 "[…] great conquerors on behalf of foreigners […] creator of the French Congo […] stimu-

lating energies […] supreme human ideals". 8 "[…] at the first appearance of their brilliance and faith […] spirits […] a purer poetic and heroic light".

## 4. Matteucci's pious colonial exploration: race, gender, religion, and anti-slavery?

Fascism no doubt exploited the more spiritual aspects of Matteucci's work. In his own writings, Matteucci comes across as a patriotic explorer, with a strong enthusiasm for exploration, religion, science and the development of geography in Italy. His (nationalist) cosmopolitanism is ambiguous in that it aims to claim a primacy for Italy on the world stage through colonialism and international relations, but also through anti-slavery narratives. For instance, he begins his book *Sudan e Gallas* by exalting the role of the SGI in the new explorations of post-unification Italy, and compares his age (and himself) to the ages (and figures) of Polo and Columbus (Matteucci 1879, 1). Matteucci also praises the role of the Catholic missions in Africa, stressing their supremacy in relation to other missions, thus bringing together a set of primacies in travel, exploration and the missionaries themselves (14).

There is no doubt that Matteucci's work at large, and especially his most interesting travel diary, *In Abissinia*, is sophisticated ethnography. Matteucci calls himself a pseudo-geographer, but his prose is imbued with philological, anthropological, archaeological, cartographical, topographical and political references. There is curiosity in his wanting to define racial types, and above all, in condemning slavery, though every consideration he makes alludes to the civilization the indigenous people lack, and the potential role of Italy in bringing it to them, first through commercial relations, and then colonial conquest. It is therefore important to pause for a moment on the way in which race, colonial exploration and the issue of slavery are addressed in Matteucci's work. In *In Abissinia*, for instance, Matteucci writes relatively positively about the Ethiopians and claims that

In Africa non credo vi sia una razza più corretta di questa; sono Europei con tanto di guadagnato nella costituzione fisica, e con una diversità di colorito che offre tutte le gradazioni nella scala dei colori dal nero d'ebano al bronzo chiaro (Matteucci 1880, 10).9

The emphasis is, of course, on women. He explains that when they are maidens, "sono estremamente seducenti"; when they become women, "sono procaci"; and when they are old, "divengon venerande".10 Matteucci's Eurocentrism and patriarchy are relatively subtle here: he stresses that the only thing missing from these "voluptuous" women is "civilization", and it is Italy (and primarily Italian men) that will remedy this by bringing it to them, so that they will really "look beautiful, even if they are black" (Matteucci 1880, 10–11).11

Here Matteucci is using gender, racial and sexual metaphors which were, of course, central to the discourse of European colonial exploration and conquest.

9 "I believe there is no better race than this in Africa; they are Europeans with a lot of advantages in their physical constitution, and with a variety of colouring that offers all the gradations from ebony black to light bronze."

10 "[…] they are exceedingly enticing […] they are busty […] they become venerable […]".

11 In the original, Matteucci uses (in italics) a Latin expression: "*Nigra sum sed formosa*".

As Clare Midgley (1998, 2) reminds us in relation to the British Empire, these metaphors were central "to the description of colonial exploration and conquest as the penetration of virgin lands", as well as "to the femininized representations of colonised men". More generally, gender was a signifier in "relationships of power" (2), while "masculine subjectivities" were imagined in relation to colonial explorers and soldier heroes. These dynamics are applicable to Italian colonial discourse too, which was broadly shaped on the model of Britain and France. Moreover, with particular regard to the question of gender, and the myth of the virgin land, Anne McClintock (1995) points out that in these patriarchal narratives, "to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason". It is therefore not a surprise that, in colonial narratives, "the eroticizing of the 'virgin' space also affects territorial appropriation, for […] white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void" (30). One more reference to Columbus seems apt in this context as he himself wrote that the Earth was not round, but "shaped like a woman's breast, with a protuberance upon its summit in the unmistakeable shape of a nipple toward which he was slowly sailing" (21). Though common to the genre of travel writing across the early modern and modern periods, these sets of gender tropes and metaphors about travel, discovery and conquest betrayed not only male anxiety and longing for the female body, but also pointed to the same image of the female body "as marking the boundary of the cosmos and the limits of the known world, enclosing the ragged men, with their dreams of pepper and pearls, in her indefinite, oceanic body" (22). In short, as summed up by McClintock, "women are the earth that is to be discovered, entered, named, inseminated and, above all, owned" (31). Far from being limited to colonized women, this ownership also extended to colonized men as a result of their "femininization". As will be seen, interracial relations often involved a sense of the colonizer's ownership of the colonized (female and male).

In Cesari's celebration, Matteucci's use of gender and racial metaphors to address colonial power are given a more pious connotation. I am particularly interested in how race and abolitionist attitudes were instrumentalized by Fascism to put forward a rhetoric—not a reality—of anti-racist justice for Fascist colonialism and foreign policy (as opposed to the supposedly more racist British and French policies). I will then move on to compare this with some other accounts of interracial relations where racism and "unofficial slavery" are prominent.

Cesari's Matteucci is presented as an adventurer, but also as a scholar and a man of deep religious feelings, whose work is sacralized as "un apostolato di scienza, fede e civiltà" (Cesari 1932, 6).12 Cesari mentions the "redemptive" nature of Matteucci's work in its concerns with racial issues and abolition, especially his study on the Akka and African races. This work, published in 1877,

12 "un apostolato di scienza, fede e civiltà".

was somehow employed by Fascism as a rhetorical tool pointing to the allegedly emancipatory nature of Italian colonialism:

In Pellegrino Matteucci furono tutte le doti di un giovane educato all'indagine scientifica, seria e rigorosa […] [egli] sentì la nobiltà di una missione di redenzione, [aveva] un animo aperto a sentimenti elevatissimi di civiltà e di patriottismo; anche di patriottismo perchè mai perdette di vista il sogno di un'Italia grande nella sua opera di colonizzazione, particolarmente in Africa. Per tali requisiti Matteucci non poteva sentirsi che un antischiavista convinto (Cesari 1932, 6).13

Matteucci did actually claim to be an anti-slavery campaigner, and he did place abolitionist campaigns at the heart of his narrative in his *La spedizione italiana all'Africa equatoriale* (1875), a short pamphlet addressed to the Marquis Orazio Antinori, secretary of the SGI. In this account, epistemology as well as religious and humanitarian concerns come together in the promise that colonialism would bring benefits to Africa through the production of knowledge, the fight against slavery and the introduction of Catholicism (Matteucci 1875, 5). Cesari, of course, is quick to exploit and amplify Matteucci's piousness, and thus writes that his was the voice of a visionary who could see what was "good" for both Africa and Italy (Cesari 1932, 9). It is on these "civilizational" and "emancipatory" objectives that Cesari based his rereading of Matteucci's journeys.

5. Matteucci's journeys and other journeys in Fascist colonial science and propaganda

Cesari's text is divided into three main accounts of the three journeys, which consist of quotations from publications and letters written by Matteucci, and Cesari's own (rather superficial) prose commentary. There is also an appendix with "documents", that is, mainly letters Matteucci wrote to institutional figures, friends, patrons, fellow travellers and family. I have already touched on some of the more significant elements of his commentary, but below are some of the most relevant points of Cesari's accounts.

Of the first journey, it is worth mentioning how Cesari praises the travellers' virtues, as both Matteucci and Gessi embarked on their expedition alone and with few resources, uncertain whether to admire more "il loro ardimento o la loro modestia" (Cesari 1932, 13).14 In Khartoum, for example, Matteucci is said to have produced some of the most vivid impressions of his journey relat-

13 "[…] an apostolate of science, faith and civilization […] Pilgrim Matteucci embodied all the qualities of a young man educated in serious and rigorous scientific investigation […] [He] felt the nobility of a mission of redemption and [had] a soul open to feelings of civilization and patriotism; patriotism because he never lost sight of the dream of a great Italy in its work of colonization, especially in Africa. As a result of his qualities, Matteucci could not but deem himself a convinced abolitionist."

14 "their passion or their modesty".

ing to his anti-slavery concerns and pious idea of colonialism, on one occasion witnessing—and perhaps even taking part in—the liberation of some slaves by cutting their chains (15).

In the narration of the second journey, Cesari makes reference to the "movimento espansionista italiano" (29),15 which he traces back to Matteucci and the early days of the SGI, and the enthusiasm and faith in his aspirations. Like many of the other texts in the series, however, his concern with Matteucci was also aimed at rectifying the general understanding of the lives and work of these travellers, as well as their findings, allegiances and identities. In Matteucci's case, it was his view of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia that needed to be rectified. Cesari, like Federzoni, was interested in reviving this impulse in the present, especially in relation to Ethiopia, and so was keen to dismiss Matteucci's warning against any commercial relations with the country. For this reason, Cesari claims that Matteucci's *In Abissinia* is "un'opera di impressioni più che di realtà assoluta" (51).16 Apart from this exception, Cesari's commentary conveys the enthusiasm of the expedition, and gives prestige to the figure of the Italian travellers coming from "l'Impero d'Italia" (even though the Italian Empire was only proclaimed four years later by Mussolini), claiming that they were treated with the utmost respect by the African kings, sultans and rulers, thus reinforcing a colonial identity for Italians via geography and exploration.

Of the third journey, except for the claim that Matteucci had been the first to have crossed Africa, most of the commentary gives accounts of routes, encounters with local kings and princes, and fellow European travellers. Cesari pauses once again on Matteucci's reflections on areas with a potential for Italian colonization, as well as on how such potential could be fulfilled through various kinds of commercial and political relations with the Wadai Sultanate and the Bornu Empire (93). Here Cesari uses Matteucci's journeys as a "handbook for exploration" in the renewed colonial climate of Fascism, proposing new itineraries of conquest and epistemological approaches and interracial attitudes towards Africans. In typically Fascist fashion, Cesari's accounts of Matteucci's journeys are at once celebratory, symbolic, spiritually invigorating, and most importantly, masculine and virile, even if pious (in relation to slavery). Cesari's conclusive remarks stress that Fascism has finally achieved Matteucci's dream of providing Italy with the "prestigio di grande potenza colonizzatrice", thanks to its overseas possessions. The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death was hence an opportunity to once again evoke liberal and Fascist Italy's dream of colonial conquest, thus placing Matteucci's name among Fascism's colonial precursors and in the "Pantheon delle glorie nazionali" (136).17

After writing *Viaggi Africani*, together with manuals of colonial history on the origins of the Italian colonial possessions (Cesari 1937), Cesari went on to write

15 "Italian expansionist movement".

16 "a work of impressions rather than of absolute reality".

17 "prestige of a great colonial power […] Pantheon of national glories".

other genealogies of travellers to Africa that were broader in scope, but even more superficial in essence. For instance, in his *Gli italiani nella conoscenza dell'Africa* (1933), Cesari continued his work of documenting Italy's "primacy" among European nations in the exploration of the continent across the ages, from ancient Rome to Fascist Italy. All these "Italian" travellers (Cesari provides hundreds of names) are praised for their discovery, knowledge, civilization, spirituality, conquest and, of course, for having made the *patria* great.18 However, in his *Orme d'Italia in Africa* (1938), Cesari contradicts what he had said in his previous work. Here he argues that the real pioneers of Fascist colonialism were those "Italian" scientists, missionaries and explorers that had travelled to Africa from 1820 to the present day, and that really paved the way to Italy's domination of North and East Africa, culminating in the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the Italian Overseas Empire (Cesari 1938, 8).19 The rhetoric of this book is dominated by the trope of imperial Rome and its tradition of colonialism, which this time would also serve as an outlet for Italian emigration and, more importantly, to "liberare milioni di schiavi"20 and bring civilization to barbaric Africa (171).

Having established how Fascism's rereading of Matteucci's (and others') journeys contributed to the construction of a colonial identity by celebrating the heroism of the "Italian" colonial explorer and the implied gender, racial and sexual tropes, it is interesting to compare the anti-slavery slant used by Cesari in his rhetorical praise of Matteucci's (and Fascism's) colonial ethos to other propaganda texts published around the same period and more centred on interracial relations. From the early 1930s, and even more so from the implementation of the racial laws in the Fascist empire in 1937 up until 1941, there was a considerable growth in the body of propaganda materials about Fascist ideas on race and empire, which ranged from ethnography and colonial novels to travel writing, Orientalist scholarship, race theory, political pamphlets and imperial historiography (De Donno 2019, 295–323). Moreover, a great deal of Fascist propaganda also dealt with interracial relations and the promise of sexual adventure in the colonies so as to allure young Italian men to join ranks in Africa. Countless colonial novels depicted the life of Italian men in the colonies

18 The Roman explorers and geographers include Aelius Gallus, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, Septimius Flaccus and Claudius Ptolemy, to mention a few, before moving on to the Middle Ages with the Vivaldi brothers, Malocello Lanzarotto, the Pizzigani brothers, Nicoloso da Recco and Angiolino de' Corbizi, up to Antoniotto Usodimare who began the tradition of working for foreign powers (in this case Portugal). The list of all the later travellers goes on with the well-known travellers and missionaries from Columbus and Pietro Della Valle and the "Italian martyrology" of missionaries such as Antonio di Pietra Bagnara and Lodovico da Laurenzana. The last couple of chapters include nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century travellers, military and missionaries to East Africa in particular, including, of course, Matteucci and Gessi, up to Fascist travellers such as Carlo Citerni, Attilio Giuliani and Eugenio Ruspoli, among others.

19 Even in this text the list of travellers is long and includes Massaia, Stella, Sapeto, Negrelli, Miani, Piaggia, Matteucci, Massari, Cecchi, Chiarini, Gessi, Casati and others.

20 "to free millions of slaves".

through sexual relations and their position of absolute power over female but also male indigenous people (Campassi and Sega 1983; Pickering-Iazzi 2000). A case in point is the novel *Femina Somala* by Gino Mitrano Sani published in 1933—one year after Cesari's volume about Matteucci—in which the "*madama*", or the "acquired" temporary African wife of the Italian colonizer is depicted as "una cosa del capitano, una serva, una schiava senza valore che deve dare il suo corpo quando il maschio bianco ha voglia carnale" (Mitrano Sani 1933, 146).21 Mitrano Sani's novel is a useful example of the way in which the travellers' colonial identity is enacted through interracial relations and was far from being shaped by genuine anti-slavery concerns. At the same time, it is evidence of the unsurprisingly contradictory nature of Fascist colonial propaganda, as well as the variety of text types produced in relation to colonial identity construction that imply travel, race, gender, sexuality and conquest.22

6. Rereading Montanelli and Emanuelli: from colonial memory to a new postcolonial cosmopolitan pluralism

By way of conclusion, to touch on the last of Hester's stages (and thus bring the three stages together), I would like to briefly draw on Del Boca's rereading of Montanelli's *XX Battaglione eritreo* and Scego's rereading of Emanuelli's *Settimana nera*, writings by travellers originally produced outside of propaganda contexts. Hence, they can provide an even greater sense of the reality surrounding the enacting of Fascist colonial identity through (inter)racial, gender and sexual metaphors. Clearly, this is a very different kind of rereading to Cesari's, relevant here as it points to the stage when Italianness moves towards a cosmopolitan pluralism and comes to terms with the memory of Italian colonial identity and its deconstruction.

Montanelli is a particularly interesting case in point as a colonial traveller and prime symbol of Italian colonial identity. As is well known, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in May 2020 protesters in the streets of Milan turned to the statue of Montanelli to do precisely the same thing that US protesters had done with the statue of Columbus in Boston, that is, deface it and spray it with graffiti. Montanelli took part in the colonial war leading to the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 as a lieutenant in a battalion of *Askari* (Eritrean soldiers of the Italian Colonial Army) and was a convinced Fascist at least until the end of the Ethiopian war. He was also the "owner" of a 12-year-old Eritrean girl called Destà, whom he "acquired" for the price of 350 liras through the infamous practice of *madamato*.Therefore, Montanelli is now widely considered to be the embodiment of Italian colonial abuse.

21 "a thing owned by the captain, a servant, a slave with no value who must give her body when the white man has carnal desire".

22 Other important examples of racist rhetoric in relation to the peoples of East Africa published in the same period include the works of anthropologist Lidio Cipriani (1931, 1932, 1935) and Orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini (1935).

*XX Battaglione Eritreo* was first published by Panorama in 1936 and obtained great success. However, it was never published again until the very recent edition by Rizzoli, which came with the addition of some unpublished letters. Montanelli, Del Boca explains, had sent the various fragments of his "war diary" to his father Sestilio, who, in turn, had given it to Massimo Bontempelli. The latter liked it and published it, while Ugo Ojetti, who liked the fact that the text was not mere propaganda, wrote a review in which he compared the young Indro to a Rudyard Kipling in becoming. Montanelli was in Africa from May 1935 to September 1936, not only for the Ethiopian war, but also, as he put it, "per ragioni letterarie" and, rather ironically, given the abuses he committed, to find a "una coscienza di uomo" (Montanelli 2002, 23).23 As the historian tells us in the introduction, Del Boca's new edition and rereading of *XX Battaglione Eritreo* has two purposes: one is personal, and is to shed more light on the famous disagreements between himself and Montanelli about the crimes of Italian colonialism and the use of mustard gas in the Ethiopian war (Montanelli denied the claims of Del Boca); the other is related to the revived interest in the history of Italian colonialism in Italy, prompted by Del Boca himself, which has now regained consideration after decades of "amnesia" (Del Boca 2010, 11–12). The daily abuses enacted by Italians in interracial relations through colonial identity were also part of the amnesia of colonialism that Del Boca challenges—hence the relevance of Montanelli's new edition in debates around colonialism in postcolonial Italy. Though not mere propaganda, Montanelli's text is concerned with the interracial relations between the *Goitana* (the Italian officer, "lord" or colonizer in general) and the *Askari*—a relationship mediated through Italian/European colonial identity. This Italianness, but also Europeanness, builds on issues of military, masculine, sexual and racial notions in the colonial context.24 Montanelli tells us that the *Goitana* is not just an "ufficiale" or simply a "signore", but "l'Assoluto" (Montanelli [1936] 2010, 25).25 Italian and European identities are negotiated as Montanelli explains that *Goitana* is an African word that encapsulates a non-European concept (whereby non-Europeans regard Europeans as deities) (25).26 The absolute power the Italian has over the African is further described with a touch of paternalism as Montanelli tells us that, when the *Askari* deal with the Italians, "scompaiono le loro volontà e coscienze, si rassegnano nelle sue mani". They become like "una tenera pietra che puoi ridurre all'espressione che ti pare" (19).27 This relationship, Montanelli writes, "impon[e all'ufficiale] d'essere un Dio", which is a feeling that "ti da

23 "for literary reasons […] a moral conscience".

24 Including homosexual interracial relations in colonial contexts—a subject studied by Aldrich in the broader European context (2003).

25 "an officer […] a lord […] the Absolute".

26 Montanelli writes: "Tu ufficiale ricordati che sei 'Goitana' e impara – l'ascaro stesso è che te lo insegna – che questa parola racchiude un concetto non europeo."

27 "their will and conscience disappear as they place themselves in the Italians' hands […] a tender stone which [the Italian officers] can reduce to the expression [they] wish".

quasi le vertigini". Indeed, this "abitudine al padreternismo è il vero mal d'Africa,28 quello della patologia umana, non soltanto letteraria" (26).29 Montanelli constructs this relationship on the assumption that it is the Africans themselves who regard the Italians and their "government"30 (or Fascist regime) as a *Goitana*, in that they look up to them as superior beings (28). This father-child and master-slave narrative can also be sexual, not just in a metaphorical sense, like in the humorous account of a special *Goitana*, Sassahà, as he was called by his *Askari*. Sassahà often visited Terù, his favourite Eritrean soldier, who, instead of taking part in conversations around the campfire at night with the other *Askari*, "preferiva addormentarsi presto perchè venisse Sassahà nella notte accanto a lui e gli parlasse con la sua dolce voce" (139–40).31

But sexual interracial relations as a way of negotiating colonial identity were of course even more popular, or at least more explicit, with female African natives. This is certainly the case narrated in Enrico Emanuelli's *Settimana nera*, 32 a novel set at the time of the Italian protectorate of Somalia, when the Italians were expected to teach democracy to the Somali and lead them to independence. Despite the parallels with Mitrano Sani's *Femina somala*, this was not a propaganda novel. However, the novel still depicts how Italians continued to exercise a form of colonial power over Africans through interracial relations (featuring both heterosexual relations with African women and hinting at homosexual relations with African men). The character in the novel is an Italian man in his forties who hunts monkeys for an American pharma company that is developing a vaccine against polio. He has his servant Abdi with him, whom he treats as his personal possession. Eventually, he is drawn into an erotic affair with Regina, the *madama* (Somali temporary wife) of Farnenti, a former Fascist hierarch who has remained in Somalia and encourages the protagonist to "own" Regina for a week while Farnenti is away. Even though the protagonist condemns the violent behaviours of Farnenti, and pretends to develop feelings of love for Regina, he too eventually falls prey to his desire for her and treats her

as abusively as Farnenti: he behaves ambiguously between the recognition and condemnation of colonial violence, and his eventual and conscious embracing of it, of which he also becomes ashamed. Indeed, his shame with regard to his sexual, gender and racial attitudes to Regina become metaphors to address the violent nature of colonial identity. This is the foundation on which a postcolonial identity for Italy can be built.

While this novel is the only real literary attempt to decolonize Italian consciousness and conscience and to come to terms with Italian colonial identity after Ennio Flaiano's *Tempo di uccidere* (1947), Scego's rereading of and "preface" to the new 2021 edition—the first after the 1961 edition—points to the lack of a debate about decolonization and the erasure of Italian colonial identity in the early (post-1960s) postcolonial period. To use Hester's parlance, Scego is herself a symbol of a plurilingual and pluricultural cosmopolitanism. Her postcolonial rereading looks at previous constructions of Italianness, from colonial identity to the post-war myth of "*Italiani brava gente*", only to denounce colonial amnesia and propose a new consciousness that acknowledges the crimes and cruelty of Italian colonialism and its legacies of racism. She says that the rereading was "la prova che cercavo" (Scego 2021, 7) to make Italians face their colonial responsibilities, as well as the responsibilities of the period of the Somali protectorate, when the myth of "Italiani brava gente" became that of "Italiani bravi insegnanti".33

Both myths are in fact easily discredited: the character of Regina is reduced to a state of slavery by Farnenti who, by dint of his "ownership", "lends" her to the protagonist of the novel. As Barbara Tonzar points out, the whole point of the novel is to explore the conscience of the protagonist as he relates ambiguously to the exploitative and bestial behaviours of former Fascist colonialists such as Farnenti, or his homosexual friend, Contardi, whose eventual suicide signals the horrors of the violence not only of the colonial period but also of the Italian protectorate of Somalia between 1950 and 1960 (Tonzar 2017, 130). Emanuelli courageously recognizes the horrors of Italian and Fascist colonialism and colonial identity,34 but for this very reason the novel was quickly dismissed in the climate of colonial amnesia of post-1960s Italy. Scego's rereading of Emanuelli's fictional travels to Somalia, in line with Hester's trajectory, is therefore timely and crucial in understanding the current transformations in postcolonial Italianness, and reckoning that a true cultural decolonization is only just beginning to take place in postcolonial Italy. The hope is that contemporary pluricultural Italianness will build further on these representations of Italian colonial violence while continuing to look at the critical moments of Italian colonial identity and their legacy through a truly cosmopolitan pluralist lens.

33 "the proof [she] was looking for"[ …] "Italians [are] good people"[…] "Italians [are] good teachers"

34 As the protagonist admits, "era ipocrisia volerla nel letto quando mi risvegliavo" ("it was hypocrisy to want her in my bed when I woke up") (Emanuelli [1961] 2021, 193).

#### Bibliography

Aldrich, Robert. 2003. *Colonialism and Homosexuality*. London-New York: Routledge.

Bacchelli, Riccardo.1935. *Mal d'Africa. Romanzo storico*. Milano: Treves.

# Unsheathing the Katana. The Long Fortune of the First Two Japanese Embassies in Italy: Rediscovery and Rereading between Continuity and Discontinuity (1873–1905)

Alessandro Tripepi1

**Abstract:** At the end of the nineteenth century, Italy welcomed an official embassy sent by the government in Tokyo to make Japan more integrated into the new world scene it was entering. The cultural and political elites of the peninsula had the chance to discover, or rather rediscover, the charm of a world that had been lost over the centuries. This essay aims to reflect on the means and meanings of this late nineteenth-century encounter. Indeed, from this moment onwards, Japan increasingly became part of Italian mental horizons, in particular through the rereading and reuse of two precedents dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that saw the two countries dialogue and "discover" each other for the first time.

**Keywords**: Italy, Japan, Iwakura, Boncompagni, mikado

## 1. Introduction

When historians examine the relations between Italy and Japan in contemporary era, they inevitably focus on the political and ideological ties that bound the regimes of the two countries from the 1920s, culminating in the alliance during the Second World War.

The intention of strengthening this friendship led the two partners to organize frequent mutual visits between the countries. However, due to the highly ideological nature of the axis between Rome and Tokyo, the attention of the visiting delegations was focused on short-term objectives. Cultural interest almost never prevailed over political and propagandistic ends, with both interlocutors attentive to the needs of the present.

During this period, many prominent political figures travelled in both directions (Vagnini 2015). In 1928, for example, the minister plenipotentiary of

1 This result is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (TACITROOTS, PI: Giulia Giannini, Grant agreement No. n. 818098).

Alessandro Tripepi, University of Milan, Italy<EMAIL_ADDRESS>0000-0002-3221-7285 Referee List (DOI 10.36253/fup\_referee\_list)

FUP Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (DOI 10.36253/fup\_best\_practice)

Alessandro Tripepi, *Unsheathing the Katana. The Long Fortune of the First Two Japanese Embassies in Italy: Rediscovery and Rereading between Continuity and Discontinuity (1873–1905)*, © Author(s), CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0.06, in Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (edited by), *Rereading Travellers to the East. Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Post-unification Italy*, pp. 83-101, 2022, published by Firenze University Press, ISBN 978-88-5518-579-0, DOI 10.36253/978- 88-5518-579-0

Japan, Count Uchida, came to Milan at the end of his diplomatic mission in Paris.2 In 1930, Imperial Prince Takamatsu travelled to Italy, accompanied by his wife.3 Finally, a few years later, in 1936, F. Ushizaka, procurator on behalf of the mayor of Tokyo Masao Yoshiyama, stayed in Milan with "l'incarico di studiare ed ispezionare l'andamento generale del lavoro nell'amministrazione municipale della vostra città".4

The Italian press and society paid great attention to these occasions of encounter between the two countries. However, due to the duration of the visit and its cultural implications, the honeymoon of Prince Nobuhito Takamatsu and his wife Kikuko was the event that aroused the greatest interest. The *Corriere della Sera* described the sumptuous receptions and ceremonies during the imperial couple's stay in Turin, Milan, Florence and Rome. It also reported on the curiosity of the public as they witnessed the unusual procession of Japanese princes passing through the Italian streets (*Corriere della Sera* 1930a, 1930b).

While it was undoubtedly an unusual event, it was certainly not unique or isolated. There are in fact several more or less recent precedents of ceremonial journeys made to the peninsula by delegations and delegates from Japan.

The first Japanese journey to Italy, the one closest in time to the imperial couple's honeymoon, was made in 1873 by the minister plenipotentiary, Iwakura Tomomi. Before that, between 1585 and 1615, two other delegations had left the archipelago under the impetus of Catholic evangelization in the Far East. These embassies were one of the first tangible moments of cultural interaction between the European and Japanese worlds and were welcomed in Italy in an atmosphere of celebration and euphoria.

The journey of the young imperial couple can be seen as a piece in a complex puzzle. It was in fact the most recent trip that a delegation from Japan had made to Italy. There is, of course, no continuity—either in time or, above all, in meaning and purpose—between the various Japanese delegations that had crossed the Italian stage since the sixteenth century. However, the journeys of the various embassies over the course of more than three centuries can be used to tie up the threads of a fluctuating relationship between the peninsula and the archipelago.

Despite receiving great attention, the young imperial couple's trip (in addition to the political and ideological closeness between Rome and Tokyo) was not enough to set in motion a process during the 1930s to rediscover and reread a more or less distant past. In fact, neither the press nor the largest cultural forum giving a voice to Italian intellectuals, the *Nuova Antologia. Rivista di lettere scienze e arti*, took the trouble to examine the long relationship between the two partners.

2 Archivio di Stato di Milano (from now on ASMi), Prefettura di Milano, Gabinetto, Carteggio fino al 1937 - Serie I, 742.

3 ASMi, Prefettura di Milano, Gabinetto, Carteggio fino al 1937 - Serie I, 742.

4 ASMi, Prefettura di Milano, Gabinetto, Carteggio fino al 1937 - Serie I, 742: "the task of studying and inspecting the general municipal administration work carried out in your city".

All attention was instead polarized around the interests of the present. Indeed, if the more openly Catholic scientific journals—such as the *Gregorianum*—dealt with the theme of the *longue durée* of contacts between Italy and the Far East, they did so from a point of view totally in line with the regime's propaganda. For example, in his considerations on the evangelizing action of the Society of Jesus in China and Japan, the Jesuit Pasquale d'Elia placed the stress almost exclusively on the fact that the mission was an Italian initiative. In his articles on Matteo Ricci and Alessandro Valignano, the two Jesuits were the main focus of attention, while the consequences of their action provided but a blurred background to the narrative (D'Elia 1935, 121–30; 1940, 482–526).

In order to explain the reasons for such a specific interest in the historiography of the 1930s, it may be useful to refer to the theory of historicism, a conception of history which has its roots in the complex thought of Giovan Battista Vico (1688–1744). At the time of the above-mentioned Japanese visits to Italy, the greatest exponent of historicism in Italy was Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). In 1938, Croce published one of his most seminal books, *La storia come pensiero e come azione* (*History as Thought and Action*). In this book, the philosopher famously maintains that the only history that can exist is contemporary history, because all history is nothing but the manifestation of the interests of the present in which the historian lives: "perché, per remoti e remotissimi che sembrino cronologicamente i fatti che vi entrano, essa è, in realtà, storia sempre riferita al bisogno e alla situazione presente, nella quale quei fatti propagano le loro vibrazioni" (Croce 2002, 13).5 While Croce was by no means involved in the Fascist regime, this conception of history could resonate strongly with the cultural atmosphere of the time and be intertwined with representations of Italian history aimed at satisfying the political needs and objectives of the present. In this sense, the reference to Croce can provide a methodological starting point for an essay that, in the 2020s, aims to reread the events of the early modern age through the documentary lens offered by the first sources to reconsider them, between the 1870s and the first decade of the following century.

Indeed, it is as a result of sudden changes in Italian and Japanese society between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the voyages of 1585 and 1615 regained the limelight. The reasons that led an entire generation of journalists, intellectuals and politicians to deal with the events of that distant past once again have to be sought in the needs of their present. These interests have to be taken into consideration in order to understand the inevitable relationship of continuity and discontinuity in the double chronological jump examined in these pages.

However, before we get there, let us go over the Japanese delegations' journeys to Italy between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and what they represented in the two different eras, namely, the one when they took place and the one when they were rediscovered and reused.

5 "because, however remote the facts may seem chronologically, in reality, history is always referred to the present needs and situation in which those facts propagate their vibrations".

#### 2. The two embassies of the modern age

Questi Principi Indiani hanno q.ta [questa] mattina nella sala Regia havuto il Concistoro publico levati al popolo da tutta la Corte, dalle guardie del Papa, et nel modo che si fa à gli altri Amb.ri [Ambasciatori] di Re […] essendo essi trè, et il quarto rimasto all'alloggiamento infermo, cioè due nipoti del Re di Fiunga, uno chiamato Yto Don Mancio et l'altro Chiyva Don Miguel nipote del Re d'Arima et del Re d'Omura. Gli altri dui sono principal.mi [principalissimi] ss.ri [signori] nel Giapon di quel regno di Figta, uno di nome Nocauro Don Iulian, et l'altro Fara Don Martin. Ha orato per loro un P.re [Padre] Iesuita Portughese, et essi sono comparsi in habiti Indiani, cioè con drappi d'oro a guisa di pacienze sopra vesti tessute di seta di varii colori a figura di diversi uccelli, con scimitarre al fianco stravaganti, et in testa cappelli di feltro mischio con piume bianche all'uso nostro.6

This is what the secretary of Pope Gregory XIII reported in March 1585 about his first meeting with the delegation of princes from Japan.

In this first image, the young Japanese delegates are placed at the edge of the scene. At the centre, the undisputed protagonists and narrators of the events were the Jesuits who accompanied them. Thus, a first interpretative problem is to understand the real dimension of these two modern-age journeys: on one hand their original meaning, and on the other the interests of the Italian society that welcomed them.

The two diplomatic initiatives that came to Europe from the archipelago should be seen in the political and cultural climate of the early modern era, when the birth of an increasingly connected world conditioned the actions of those European actors who claimed to be universal: the Philippine monarchy and the Counter-Reformation church (Broggio 2003, 249–89; 2004; 2013, 441–78; Visceglia 2013; Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo 2001; Clossey 2008; Tremml-Werner 2015, 192–99).

Two subjects with such a marked institutional asymmetry cannot be directly compared. A general parallel between these two actors, however, seems inevitable: indeed it is right to underline that both found their "Eldorado" in the Far East. They saw sixteenth-century Japanese society as the perfect context in which to assert their hegemonic models. The first, the Jesuits, opted for a spir-

6 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. Lat. 1053, Rome, 23 March 1585, ff. 138–39: "These Indian princes held their public consistory this morning in the royal hall in front of the people and the whole court in the manner of the king's ambassadors. There were three of them, while the fourth remained in his quarters because he was ill: one is a nephew of the king of Fiunga, and is called Yto Don Mancio, the other is called Chiyva Don Miguel and is a nephew of the king of Arima and the king of Omura. The other two are noble lords of the kingdom of Figta in Japan, one named Nocauro Don Iulian, and the other Fara Don Martin. A Portuguese Jesuit spoke for them; they appeared in Indian dress, that is to say: in robes of multi-coloured silk with various birds painted on them and with gilt inserts. They wore extravagant scimitars on their hips, and hats on their heads with white feathers as we are accustomed to wear."

itual conquest using the cross rather than the sword; the second, the Spanish, wanted to make Japan a bridgehead for their oceanic and imperialist ambitions. The archipelago was supposed to serve both as a port of call for their galleons on the long Pacific route crossings, and— above all—as an outpost for a (mainly dreamed-of) conquest of China (Boxer 1969; Sola 2012).

The hybridization of the hegemonic strategies of the two European players, with the Jesuits increasingly interested in the construction of a parastatal network and the Spaniards ready to exploit the contrasts existing between the Society and the other religious orders active in the East, led to an increasingly evident rivalry, which at the end of the 1580s resulted in ill-concealed hostility that ended up damaging both contenders (Broggio, Cantù, Fabre, and Romano 2007; Millán and Visceglia 2008, 26–31; Sola 2012, 23–39; Friedrich 2017; Corradi 2019; Tripepi 2021).

At the third vertex of this triangle were the political institutions of the Japanese archipelago. After an initial phase of fleeting opportunities for contact left to the initiative of Portuguese captains, the Jesuits were the first Europeans to settle permanently in Japan. From 1549, with the arrival of Francis Xavier, the Jesuit mission laid the foundations for the next half century of success (Boxer 1951; Elisonas 1991, 2008; Boscaro 2008; Correia 2018).

From the very first contacts, the Japanese institutions paid particular attention to the newcomers: in a period of great social unrest and a void of power since the end of the previous century, large sections of Japanese society looked to them with interest and sympathy. The weakest social classes were fascinated by the concepts of equality and personal freedom that traditional local religions did not contemplate. Moreover, in a period of violent wars and deprivation, the Christian concept of life beyond death was a reassurance in the face of conditions of misery and uncertainty. On the other hand, the so-called *daimyos*, the powerful territorial lords who gained possession of the voids left by the crumbling central power, considered the Jesuit fathers an opportunity to enrich themselves and their territories. It was in this climate that, from the 1550s until at least the second half of the 1580s, the Jesuits prospered and the religion spread throughout local society (Elisonas 2008; Bang 2015; Hesselink 2016; Wirbser 2017; Correia 2018; Tripepi 2021).

In the first 30 years of unexpected expansion for the Jesuit mission, the need for order and regulation had been overlooked. It was only in 1579, with the arrival of the visitor-general of the Indies, Alessandro Valignano, that the foundations on which the Jesuit missionary edifice rested were strengthened and stabilized (Moran 1993; Ross 1999; Luca 2005, 22–24; Tamburello, Üçerler, and Di Russo 2008).

Among the many operations carried out by the Jesuit from Abruzzo was the establishment of special seminaries, schools and colleges to create an indigenous clergy capable of actively integrating the work of the European missionaries. He also visited the great *daimyos* who were friends of Catholicism and it was from these meetings that the idea of a *Cerimoniale* for the brothers working in Japan was born. This operation was necessary so that they would be aware of what behaviour and external manifestations Japanese society could expect from members of the religious hierarchy.

What Valignano did was formalize an evolution that had already started some time before. The text was therefore the ideological manifesto of the Society's actions in Japan and the first theorization of Jesuit syncretism. From now on, the fathers were advised to conform their external practices to the local Japanese religions: clothing, attitudes, even the architecture of the sacred places. In the Japanese minds, everything had to evoke the idea of respect paid to their religious authorities (Sanfilippo 1997; Catto 2011).

With the formulation of the theory of *adaptatio*, the Society completed on the doctrinal and theoretical level the evolutionary process that had already been underway for a decade on the political level. After these changes, in 1586, Valignano wrote to General Claudio Acquaviva in a state of despondency owing to criticism from inside and outside the order. The visitor's words, full of regret, show the difficulty of presenting the particular conditions present in Japan to the European world:

[…] poiché le cose che avvengono così lontano […] sono tanto caratterizzate da circostanze così ignote e insolite, come quelle del Giappone, non si lasciano comprendere in fretta e bene come conviene, essendo questo punto così importante, di certo mi perdo d'animo non sapendo come posso ben chiarirlo e farlo ben capire (Boscaro 2008, 215).7

Valignano's answer to the sceptics and detractors of the Jesuit actions in the archipelago was a masterpiece of cunning. By sending a delegation of young Japanese princes to Europe, he would confront the old continent with the reification of a very precise narrative of Japan: the Japan presented by the delegation and the one recounted by the fathers in their letters should totally coincide. In this way, the European world see the successes and difficulties of the Jesuit evangelization in Japan for itself and realize that, far from being blameworthy, the policy of adaptation to the circumstances had been useful for the spread and establishment of the Catholic faith there.

It is known that crowds met the Japanese princes on their European journey in what Angelantonio Spagnoletti defined as "a phenomenon of collective hysteria that crossed the Iberian and Italian courts" (Spagnoletti 2018, 225–26). Everyone was involved, and the Society's propaganda move was—at least in the short term—extremely successful: from Madrid to Rome, passing through Florence, Venice, Mantua, Ferrara, Milan and Genoa, everyone participated actively and with genuine interest in the passage of this unusual procession.

The return of the embassy coincided with the beginning of a new political phase for the archipelago, however, cementing what had already begun at the

7 "[…] since things that happen so far away […] are so characterized by unknown and unusual circumstances—like in Japan—they cannot be understood quickly or as well as they should be, and since this point is so important, of course I feel frustrated not knowing how I can clarify it and make it well understood."

end of the previous decade. Indeed, the 1580s saw the autonomist impulses coming from the endless galaxy of small and large local potentates be forcefully and steadily counteracted by the central political authorities (Hesselink 2016, 88–91, 97–102, 141–46; Correia 2018).

First Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi succeeded in creating the basis for the definitive recentralization of political power. Despite starting under the best auspices for the Society, this new phase soon turned against the fathers. Supporting the independent positions of the southern *daimyos*, they were involved in the open clash that followed and were defeated and deprived of the position of advantage and privilege that had been their strength and fortune for almost half a century.

The Spaniards, on the other hand, took advantage of the new situation: uncompromising with the enemies of the new master of the Japanese political scene, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, they were seen as the perfect partner to make the country's economy flourish. The result was a profound split in the Catholic front, so much so that at the end of his reign, Philip II undertook an investigation campaign against the Society in order to discredit the fathers and limit their power and influence (Millàn and Visceglia 2008, 26–31).

The immediate result was a great increase in the presence of the Franciscan order in the archipelago, which was closely linked to the Philippine monarchy. The Jesuits had to accept the change, despite the attempts of Valignano who, in 1585, had managed to obtain a bull from Pope Sixtus V granting them the exclusive right to evangelize Japan: a bull that was swiftly disregarded and cast aside by the development of events.8

The idea of a second embassy came from a Franciscan, Luis Sotelo. The aim of the trip was to create a diocese in northern Japan to flank that of Nagasaki, which had been a Jesuit monopoly for decades: Sotelo hoped to become bishop of this hypothetical new diocese. In order to satisfy his career goals, the Andalusian Franciscan reached an agreement with the *daimyo* of Oshu, in the north of the archipelago, exploiting his ambitions to become the official intermediary in the trade between Spain and Japan.

A pompous diplomatic mission to Madrid was organized in order to negotiate new routes that would also allow the Japanese to reach Europe on a yearly basis (León-Portilla 1981; Gil 1991, 384–425; Alvar 1995; Fernández Gómez 1999; Lee 2008; López-Vera 2013; Colomar Albajar and Lázaro de la Escosura 2013). The request was somewhat provocative: to accept it would have meant that the Spanish king, Philip III, who had succeeded his father, would have voluntarily relinquished his position of global commercial supremacy and hegemony. So, it

8 The archival documentation on this subject is both rich and explicit: Hideyoshi was aware of the hostilities within the Catholic front and decided to exploit them to his advantage. The growth of the Franciscan presence led to an increasing decline in the Society's importance. Even the bulls of Sixtus V were quickly disregarded and cancelled by his successors. *Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu*, Jap. Sin. 12 II, ff. 191v–192r, Gams (1957, 132) and Sorge (1991, 29).

was inevitable that the king was reluctant to grant an audience to the delegates, all the more so after *daimyo* Date Masamune's decision to send the embassy on board the first ocean-going ship built and piloted entirely by Japanese seafarers.

The arrival of the vessel in Mexico was seen as—almost— an explicit declaration of war: not only did the embassy require the Spanish to voluntarily renounce their hegemony, but even showed them that this hegemony could be broken at any moment, with the direct entry of the Japanese into the transoceanic routes.9

The initial dismay was followed by rigid closure dictated by fear, the main victim being Sotelo's careerist ambitions.10

Developed and pursued in a context that was strongly hostile to the embassy's intended objectives, the Franciscan friar's legation project foundered once and for all when he returned to the East: arrested and imprisoned in the Philippines, Sotelo managed to escape and paid a Chinese captain to take him back to Japan. However, the favourable political climate of appeasement, dialogue and confrontation with the Europeans re-established after Hideyoshi's death, under the leadership of Tokugawa Ieyasu, soon changed with the rise to power of his son Hidetada, responsible for the first anti-Christian edicts and progressive closure to the European world. When Sotelo reached the Japanese coast, he was denounced as a Christian priest by the Chinese captain who had accompanied him. Locked up again in prison, he was found guilty and burnt alive in Nagasaki in 1624.

#### 3. Recovering and rereading the past

The burning of the Sevillian friar was the extreme representation of Japan's definitive closure to the Christian religion. A few years later, in 1639, all Europeans would be expelled from the country and only the Dutch would maintain an entrepôt—subject to strict and severe controls—on the artificial island of Dejima (Iannello 2012).

For the next 250 years, Japan and Italy remained totally estranged worlds that almost lost all memory of these first contacts.

It was only in 1854, with the arrival of American gunboats commanded by Commodore Perry in Kanagawa Bay, that the archipelago was forced to reopen to the West and resume the contacts it had broken off more than two centuries earlier. From this moment on, and even more so with the fall of the shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji era in 1868, Japan took rapid and continuous steps to integrate itself into the existing network of international relations. In particular, in 1871 it became necessary to send a delegation with the task of re-

9 Archivo General de Indias, Gobierno, Audiencia de Filipinas, 1, n. 150, ff. 1–3.

10 Philip III's reaction was so harsh that not only did he initially deny the delegates an audience, but he also put a spanner in the works once they had left Madrid for Rome. There, in order not to risk Pope Paul V being persuaded to grant the two delegates what he had promptly denied them, he made sure that his ambassador in the city kept a constant watch on and informed him of every subsequent development. Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Fondo Borghese, Serie IV, n. 65, lettere diverse, 1615 f. 56.

negotiating the terms of the "unequal treaties" stipulated by the archipelago with its western partners. Furthermore, the embassy was to collect useful and important information to facilitate Japan's entry into the restricted group of industrialized powers of the time.

The journey of the Iwakura delegation lasted several years and took the Japanese ambassadors to both the USA and the main European states. The stop in Italy, which lasted almost a month from 8 May to 2 June 1873, was one of the most prestigious on the journey (Nish 1998; Kunitake 2009). It was an opportunity to sew back together the threads of a relationship that had been interrupted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The arrival in Italy of the first delegation truly expressing Japanese wishes and interests also brought the two modern-age embassies back into the limelight.

The focus on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missions was primarily based on documentary investigation, with the aim of reconstructing the material legacies produced by the two encounters. The task of bringing to light the events of that faded past was taken on by late nineteenth-century scholarship, in particular the Venetian Guglielmo Berchet (1877).

Berchet's work, published in 1877, is not only the first account of the two Japanese journeys almost three centuries apart, it also fits perfectly into the climate of his time: it was the inevitable consequence of the events that were taking place in that period. In fact, not only did Iwakura stop off in Italy in 1873, but only a couple of years later, in 1875, namely about a decade after the beginning of bilateral relations between the two countries, Rome and Tokyo began negotiations to create a permanent Japanese consulate on Italian territory, which was opened in 1876.11

The establishment of official diplomatic relations between the two countries generated extraordinary attention to all matters relating to Japan. Moreover, the fresh memory of the Iwakura mission provided a very close precedent to refer to in the study of the two modern-age missions.

The structure of Berchet's work betrays a purely erudite and descriptive interest: the sources recovered are not questioned, but simply presented to the reader as glimpses of a past reproposed in the present to arouse the curiosity of those who had only been aware of the existence of Japan for a few years. The same aim is also reflected in the meticulous attention paid to the more material aspects of these first encounters: the diplomas of Roman citizenship issued to the Japanese princes during their visits to the papal court, as well as the descriptions of the stuccoes and brocades in the rooms where they stayed, and the gifts brought from so far away to pay homage to the political authorities of the peninsula.

11 The city originally chosen to host the consulate was Milan, as the Tokyo government considered it to be the most important economic centre in Italy. The initial aim, again on the Japanese side, was to boost trade relations between the two countries. The *Corriere della Sera*, established in 1876, gave a detailed description of the events of those years in its issue of 19 March 1882.

Berchet's work interpreted the climate of his time and was instrumental to the interests that saw Italy and Japan drawing ever closer together in those years: it was the result of the needs and ambitions of a political and cultural class that regarded the Land of the Rising Sun as a new "Eldorado" to reach out to, just as it had been for the Society of Jesus 300 years earlier.

In fact, at the same time as diplomatic agreements were being signed between the two countries, a pressing—and successful—advertising campaign was launched in all the main newspapers of the kingdom in order to convince Italian companies to invest in Japan, especially in the silk sector.12 The interest of the Italian ruling class was to present the new relations established with the Asian country within a framework of continuity with the past. Through the constant reference to the precedents of the modern age, Japan could be defined as a "historical" partner of the peninsula. It is no coincidence that numerous newspaper articles were dedicated to the two modern-age embassies, both in the local and national press, when the Iwakura delegation was in Italy.13

The press benefited from the favourable climate that formed the backdrop to the resumption of official contacts between the two countries. Breaking the fourth wall, the two sixteenth- and seventeenth-century embassies went from being the subject of a narrative that had seen them as protagonists, to playing a passive role: a sort of mirabilia to be shown to the new guests arriving from the archipelago almost three centuries later.

Questa mattina [gli ambasciatori giapponesi] si recarono a vedere l'Archivio generale dei Frari, e il portico del Seminario, dove si conservano memorie giapponesi, da essi esaminate col massimo interesse. Come abbiamo altra volta accennato, riportando i documenti dell'Archivio dei Frari, venne nell'anno 1585 da Roma a Venezia un'ambasciata preseduta dal signor Ito Mantio, e fu la prima venuta in Europa; poi nell'anno 1615 una seconda ambasciata, preseduta dal signor Nasekura. I documenti di queste ambascerie furono in parte pubblicati, e siamo informati che l'attuale ambasciata ne commisse la raccolta completa (*Gazzetta di Venezia* 1873).14

In rapid succession, in under 20 years, Italy welcomed the first official delegation from Japan (1873); authorized the establishment of a permanent consulate (by 1875); launched a widespread publicity campaign in all print media to encourage economic and trade relations with Japan; and started to build armaments for resale to Japan. From a propagandistic point of view, the two modern-age embassies undoubtedly played a central role in supporting the interests that linked Rome and Tokyo.

This unusual alliance held up well and indeed was further strengthened (and with it the interest in the two modern-age embassies) by the complicated evolution of the international framework as from the start of the new century Japan began to engage in a series of brazen and victorious military campaigns in Asia. The victims were mainly China and Korea, but it was clear to all that Russia was the real obstacle to Japanese interests. We can see the reaction of Italian public opinion as the tension between the two powers grew: conveyed by both the press and literature, with the publication of a new work dedicated to the two modern-age embassies, the peninsula looked upon the war exploits pitting the archipelago against its antagonists in the Far East with ill-concealed sympathy.15

It was in this climate that in 1904 Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, a future senator of the Italian kingdom, published a second volume dedicated to the two delegations' journeys in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Boncompagni Ludovisi 1904). This work filled some documentary gaps in Berchet's essay, in particular describing the Roman sojourn of the two embassies in greater detail. Nevertheless, just like the text of the Venetian scholar, Ludovisi's work also veered towards uncritically chronicling the facts.

Although very similar in methodological approach to Berchet's previous work, owing to the calibre of its author and, above all, the debate it generated, Ludovisi's text marked a turning point in the reinterpretation of the two Japanese delegations' journeys during the modern age. At the same time, it also al-

the greatest interest. As we have already mentioned, the documents in the Frari archive reveal that in 1585 an embassy led by Mr Ito Mantio came from Rome to Venice, and this was the first to reach Europe; then in 1615 a second embassy was led by Mr Nasekura. The documents of these embassies were partly published, and we are informed that the present embassy commissioned a complete collection of them".

15 The first news about the Japanese war effort in the Far East dates back to the summer of 1894. On 1 August 1894, the *Corriere della Sera* published an article referring explicitly to the conflict between China and Japan for the control of the Korean peninsula. The war, which lasted only a few months, saw the archipelago triumph over the Chinese Empire, creating the conditions for the subsequent war with Russia, which was worried about excessive Japanese interference on the continent. In this sense, the article in the *Corriere della Sera* of 15–16 March 1895 (*Corriere della Sera* 1895) is of great interest: "Le simpatie degli Europei sono tutte per i Giapponesi, perché si dimostrarono valorosi, coraggiosi, intraprendenti; e tutti augurano la vittoria finale al Giappone e la rovina dei Cinesi" ("The sympathies of the Europeans are all for the Japanese, because they are proving to be brave, courageous and enterprising; everyone [in Europe] hopes for a Japanese victory and a Chinese defeat"). See also Berryman, Neilson, and Nish (1994), Paine (2003), Zachmann (2009) and Fröhlich (2014).

lows us to take a deeper look at the motivations and interests that were at the basis of that particular turn-of-the-century rereading.

The first factor to consider is the origins of the author of the text. Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, born in the 1880s, was the young descendant of a noble Umbrian family whose origins date back as far as the sixteenth century (Re 1930). Going back in time, it is possible to note an interesting coincidence which, combined with the political contingencies of the young Francesco's time, may help to understand why he was interested in the two embassies that had arrived from Japan three centuries earlier. It is a coincidence that lies in his family origins, at least on the Boncompagni side, which can be traced back to Ugo Boncompagni, better known by the name of Gregory XIII.

It was precisely Pope Boncompagni who, in 1585, a few weeks before his death, had welcomed the first delegation from Japan to Rome with a solemn public consistory. This not only provides an instrumental explanation for the young Francesco's choice of subject for his work, that is, to pay homage to his illustrious ancestor, but it also helps to understand the methodological structure used throughout the text, with its attention to the cardinals' documentation and the notices composed by the papal secretaries. He had access to these documents, unlike Berchet 20 years earlier.

Moreover, the young Francesco was particularly attentive to the national and international political situation, both by personal inclination and family background. In the space of a few years, he embarked on a political career, becoming first a deputy and then a senator of the Italian kingdom (Margiotta Broglio 1969).

The specific interest in Japan shown by Boncompagni Ludovisi in his work can therefore—once again—be attributed to the "vibrations" produced by past events in the present. In this regard, the date of publication of the text is not at all accidental: 1904, during the most heated phases of the conflict between Russia and Japan in the East. It was precisely in those months that Italy risked becoming involved in the conflict.

The ill-concealed sympathy with which the Italian political tribune looked towards the Japanese triumphs in the East encouraged two of the most important Italian industrialists of the time, Giovanni Bombrini and Ferdinando Maria Perrone, to engage in building armaments to be resold to the Asian partner (*Corriere della Sera* 1904).16 Both Bombrini and Perrone were closely involved

16 The first news of the involvement of Italian industrialists in the construction of armaments for resale to non-European partners dates to an article published in the *Corriere della Sera* on 3 January 1902. On that occasion, the interests of Italian industrialists were linked to a conflict that had developed on the South American continent, between Argentina and Venezuela. Senator Bombrini expressly denied Italian involvement in the construction of armaments to be resold to the Buenos Aires government (*Corriere della Sera* 1902). However, on 10 January 1903 the *Corriere della Sera* again reported the launch of two battleships destined for Argentina from the shipyard of Sestri Ponente. Moreover, the article of 8 January 1904 goes on to report "strange" movements in the Spezia shipyards: it seems that munitions had been brought by an Italian navy ship to the two Ansaldo ships purchased by Japan (*Corriere della Sera* 1904). This umpteenth Italian involvement to the advantage of Japan confirms the entanglement between Italian industry and the Land of the Rising Sun.

in running the engineering and shipbuilding giant Ansaldo. The biggest problem, however, was that the projects for these armaments were executed by the Italian Ministry of the Navy; this put the Italian political authorities in a delicate position with respect to Russia, risking creating the conditions for Italy's involvement in the war. The disrespect towards the tsar was reported in the pages of the socialist newspaper *Avanti!*, which had close ties to St Petersburg. These considerations were also quoted in their entirety in other newspapers, such as the *Corriere della Sera*:

L'*Avanti!* protesta perché a Genova si è compiuto un contratto di vendita fra l'Argentina e il Giappone di navi costruite da una casa italiana, l'Ansaldo. Esso dice: "Le navi argentine avrebbero dovuto essere condotte in un porto argentino, oppure in qualsiasi porto estero e là si sarebbe dovuto conchiudere il contratto e cambiare la bandiera alle navi, ammainando i colori argentini e alzando il sole vermiglio del Mikado. Il far ciò all'ombra della bandiera italiana fu una sconvenienza verso la Russia. Non bisogna anzitutto dimenticare che queste due navi non sono creazioni della ditta costruttrice, ma che furono eseguite sui piani del nostro Ministero della marina. Tutte le tenerezze, tutti i riguardi per la Russia non esistevano che quando si trattava di giudicare i fischi dei socialisti, ma ora invece ogni riguardo per la Russia non esiste più. Ci sono di mezzo gli interessi degli industriali navali Bombrini e Perrone e quindi vada al diavolo la Russia e lo Zar e viva il Mikado!" (*Corriere della Sera* 1904).17

It was therefore fundamental for the political and cultural elite of the time to justify this choice, which had almost led to a diplomatic crisis with Russia, owing to the *longue durée* of relations with Japan. The concealed objective was precisely to trace back to the two modern-age embassies, on which Boncompagni Ludovisi's work intended to cast new light and greater notoriety, the reasons for an alliance that on the threshold of the new century was no longer only economic and cultural but evolving towards a political and military alignment.

# 4. Conclusions

In conclusion, how should we consider Italian society's late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reinterpretation of the journeys of the two embassies

17 "*Avanti!* protested because a sales contract between Argentina and Japan of ships built by the Italian company Ansaldo had been concluded in Genoa. It says: 'The Argentine ships should have been taken to an Argentine port, or to any other foreign port, and the contract should have been concluded there and the flag of the ships should have been changed, lowering the Argentine colours and raising the vermilion sun of the mikado. To do this in the shadow of the Italian flag was improper towards Russia. First of all, it must not be forgotten that these two ships were not created by the construction company but built according to the plans of our Ministry of the Navy. All the endearment, all the consideration for Russia only existed when it was time to judge the socialists' whistles, but now consideration for Russia no longer exists. What is important here are the interests of the shipbuilders Bombrini and Perrone, and so to hell Russia and the tsar and long live the mikado!'".

that had arrived from Japan three centuries earlier? What were the aims of this political and intellectual process of reinterpretation? And finally, what consequences did it have on the intricate relationship between continuity and discontinuity at the basis of processes to reread the past?

Faced with a society that was ever more intimately connected to Japan, there was a clear need for the Italian elites of the time to explain the reason behind this connection to themselves and to the world. This need and purpose clearly emerge when consulting the digital archives of two of the main newspapers of that period: *La Stampa* and *Corriere della Sera*.

If we analyse the presence of the word "Japan" in the two newspapers year by year, we can see the exponential growth of the space occupied by this topic in Italian society: from a few dozen times in the early 1870s, to several thousand in the early 1900s. The increase remained almost constant, with two peaks: the first was around 1873–1878, while the second was reached in the first five years of the new century. The explanation is easy: in the first case it was due to the official resumption of relations between the two countries, the arrival of the Iwakura delegation and the creation of a permanent consulate in Milan. In the second case, the effects of the Russo-Japanese conflict that was raging in the Far East played a decisive role.

The newspapers of the time were a litmus test of the political and cultural interests of Italian society. The fact that Berchet's and Boncompagni Ludovisi's works saw the light precisely at the peak of Italian society's attention to the Japanese world encourages us to consider these rereadings of the modern-age embassies' travels as instrumental to a collective and national interest. Tracing the motivations for the increasingly pronounced partnership back to those early days was a strategy aimed at legitimizing the political, economic and cultural interests of the time. To use Croce's words, it was in essence the manifestation of how history becomes an instrument to refer to a present need.

On the other hand, this continuity, which found its greatest expression in the appearance of scholarly works dedicated to the long-standing relationship between Italy and Japan, needs to be compared to the appearance—at the very end of the conflict between the mikado and the tsar—of a scientific and intellectual debate in discontinuity with the narrative that had been offered until then.

In this sense, volume 35 of the prestigious journal *Archivio Storico Italiano*, published in 1905, contained a review of Boncompagni Ludovisi's work that deserves careful consideration. This was the first time that the focus on the two journeys made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was taken out of the limited sphere of erudite and travel accounts, to instead concentrate on their real value:

Dopo le opere del Gualtieri e del Berchet sulla prima ambasceria, e dell'Amati sulla seconda, e dopo quest'ultimo lavoro, dove si vedono raccolte, sopra entrambe, le notizie che fino ad oggi rimasero inedite, resta poco o punto a dire circa la venuta in Italia de' Giapponesi, e la dimora che vi fecero, le accoglienze che vi ebbero, e ogni altra particolarità di simil genere; ma resta molto a sapersi rispetto alla sostanza de' fatti. Intendo dire, che il leggitore europeo, il quale, da tutto quel che fu scritto, volesse, per esempio, farsi un'idea giusta del valore reale della prima ambasceria, non ne verrebbe a capo (Puini 1905, 468).18

The following pages describe the historical and political process that led to the organization and sending of the first delegation. From the arrival in the archipelago of the first Portuguese, who were soon joined by the first Jesuits, to the situation of political fluidity and instability in Japan at that time, and the convergence of interests between the *daimyos* and the Catholic avant-garde in the Far East: painted with rapid but precise brushstrokes, all this context was used for the first time to explain why the delegation was sent and to understand its objectives and results. It was also pointed out that "I PP. Gesuiti, che pensarono tale Ambasceria, ne esposero chiaramente il fine, e il modo che avevasi a tenere, modesto anzi che no, nel riceverla tra noi" (Puini 1905, 471).19 What is more, the reasons for the erroneous conviction that "Que' giovani giapponesi […] furono aspettati ed accolti come se venissero a portare a' Principi d'Europa, specie al Pontefice, gli atti di devozione di tutto il Giappone, in nome del sovrano, o de' sovrani, che ivi allora regnavano" (Puini 1905, 471) were to be sought in European needs for greatness and splendour.20

Offspring of its time and of the needs of a political and cultural class that had become closer and closer to Japan since the 1870s, the attention paid in the first decade of the new century to the modern-age embassies created the intellectual conditions to break the continuity with the past and initiate a totally new phase. While starting from great nineteenth-century erudition, the new direction taken in the rereading of that distant past was one of progressive distancing from previous studies, creating the premises and the bases for a fruitful—and not yet fully concluded—phase of critical debate on the theme of the first Euro-Japanese contacts during the modern age.

## Archives

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV), Fondo Borghese, Serie IV, n.65, lettere diverse, 1615 f. 56.

Archivio di Stato di Milano (ASMi), Prefettura di Milano, Gabinetto, Carteggio fino al 1937 - Serie I, 742.

Archivo General de Indias, Gobierno (AGI), Audiencia de Filipinas, 1, n. 150, ff. 1-3.

# Bibliography

Correia, Pedro Lage. 2018. "Violence, identity and conscience in the context of the Japanese Catholic Mission (16th Century)". In *Compel people to come in. Violence and Catholic Conversions in the non-European World*, edited by Vincenzo Lavenia, Stefania Pastore, Sabina Pavone, and Chiara Petrolini, 103–16. Roma: Viella.

*Corriere della Sera*. 1895. "Conferenza sulla Cina e sul Giappone." March 15th–16th, 1895.

Spagnoletti, Angelantonio. 2018. *Filippo II*. Salerno: Salerno Editrice.

# Lodovico Nocentini: A Rereader of Modern Italian Travellers to China

Aglaia de Angeli

**Abstract:** In 1882, Nocentini published *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci*. The first secular biography of the famous Italian Jesuit to China, it posed important questions about the origins of sinology and the role of Matteo Ricci as an early modern Italian traveller in Sinowestern relations. Nocentini's rereading of Matteo Ricci and travel literature in Italy in the late nineteenth century is examined through theories proposed by Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov. These theories provide an interpretative approach to understand the rereading carried out in Nocentini's work, as they are intended as a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, as well as appropriation of the original meaning.

**Keywords:** Lodovico Nocentini, Matteo Ricci, sinology

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader. Vladimir Nabokov, *Lectures on Literature* (1980)

## 1. Introduction1

In 1882, Lodovico Nocentini published *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci* (The First Sinologist: F. Matteo Ricci) in which he researched the historical figure of Jesuit father Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who, alongside Marco Polo, received credit for the European discovery of China. Intended for an Italian readership, Nocentini's biographical work strove to reveal Ricci not only as a missionary figure, but above all as the first scholar to provide a bridge between Chinese and western knowledge. Nocentini's work on Ricci has long been forgotten, being regarded as of little scientific value. Yet, the text deserves our attention as it was the first to focus on the status of sinology in Europe, particularly Italy, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more generally it explains the contribution of modern Italian travellers to Sino-western relations.

1 I would like to thank Mauro Brunello, Maria Luisa Paternicò and Davor Antonucci for their help in identifying and checking the Jesuit sources. Any mistakes, however, are entirely mine.

Aglaia De Angeli, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>0000-0003-3948-3612 Referee List (DOI 10.36253/fup\_referee\_list)

FUP Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (DOI 10.36253/fup\_best\_practice)

Aglaia de Angeli, *Lodovico Nocentini: A Rereader of Modern Italian Travellers to China*, © Author(s), CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0.07, in Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste (edited by), *Rereading Travellers to the East. Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Postunification Italy*, pp. 103-123, 2022, published by Firenze University Press, ISBN 978-88-5518-579-0, DOI 10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0

Nocentini's remarks on Matteo Ricci and his contribution to the establishment of sinology as a field of study are reread in this paper through theories proposed by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov emphasizes that a good reader is someone who rereads. But rereading has two, non-exclusive meanings: to read again and to reinterpret. To reread and so to reinterpret an author, topic and publication such as Nocentini's *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci* is a complex interpretative exercise that will be assisted by Derrida's and Barthes' theoretical approaches to rereading. In *OfGrammatology* (1967), Derrida affirms that rereading is a process corresponding to four actions: reinterpretation, new interpretation, appropriation and adding a new meaning. In his *S/Z* (1970), on the other hand, Barthes assumes a semiotic approach to rereading. For Barthes, rereading is a process of decoding in which the reader appreciates the plurality of meanings offered by the author right from the text's very drafting. Derrida and Barthes' quest for meaning will lead us to be rereaders of Nocentini, who in turn reread Matteo Ricci. By examining these rereadings over the long span of time between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, we find ourselves opening a long series of Chinese boxes. These boxes take us from philology to semiotics, to discover the meaning of rereading Italian modern travellers to China.

Ultimately, therefore, to analyse Nocentini is to understand his research as relating the legacy of Ricci to the formation of sinology as a field of study and to successive generations of sinologists. Furthermore, to discuss Nocentini's life and literary production is to acknowledge the journey in space and time and history that we are taken on when rereading *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci*, and to acknowledge what the re/reader of Nocentini's *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci* is offered by travel literature more in general.

#### 2. Rereader and author: Nocentini rereads Matteo Ricci and travel literature

Lodovico Nocentini was born in Florence in 1849, where he graduated in oriental languages in 1879. After a short period in the Italian diplomatic delegation to China, Nocentini began a long and successful career in academia and first became professor and chancellor of the University of Naples before moving to La Sapienza University in Rome.2

Nocentini was a prolific author and in a career lasting from 1878 to 1910 he produced more than 70 publications. He covered topics ranging from politics to languages and from social to cultural studies, regarding a vast area covering central, eastern and south-eastern Asia. In the early stage of his academic career, Nocentini dedicated most of his attention to China and Japan, with publications about social and cultural aspects of the two countries, including publications on the Chinese language and translated Chinese and Japanese historical texts, such as *La Ribellione di Masacado e Sumitomo* (1878) and *Il santo editto di K'anhi e l'amplificazione di Yun-cen* (1880).

2 For a detailed biography of Nocentini, see De Angeli (2014).

A few years later, Nocentini published his first research monograph, which was not a translation of historical texts, but rather a work of research on Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci at the Ming court: *Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci*. Nocentini conducted the research for this volume in the late 1870s and presented some partial results at the Fourth International Congress of Orientalists held in Florence in September 1878, before the full research results were finally published by Le Monnier in 1882. The text is a short monograph of only 59 pages, the first eight pages of which had been published in the records of the 1878 congress. The monograph is divided into three parts: the dedication, preface and text. In particular, the volume highlights that the research subject is Matteo Ricci, humanist, man of letters and science and sinologist; Ricci the missionary, on the other hand, only remains visible in the background, as his experience was nevertheless essential in enabling him to travel to China and relate to the Chinese literati and court. Nocentini was the first Italian secular author to write a biography of Ricci and his goal in compiling the work was to highlight the scientific and cultural dialogue between China and the West.3 Today, Matteo Ricci is a well-known and widely researched figure, and the countless biographies and works assess his contribution to building a bridge between Chinese and western knowledge.4 Yet, before Nocentini's publication in 1882, very little was written on Ricci and his legacy, a topic which was largely seen as falling within the competence of religious scholars. Therefore, Nocentini's work was novel in that he was a secular author and sinologist rereading Matteo Ricci and his legacy across the centuries: he was a young Italian academic trying to establish the role of post-unification Italy in the development of sinology, and proving the contribution of Italian genius to the world.

It is significant that the seventeenth-century boom in publications presenting Ricci's life and achievement in China was followed by a hiatus, until Nocentini's monograph. Literary productions focusing on Matteo Ricci started in 1610, the year of his death in Beijing. The first book about his work, entitled *Annua della Cina del 1606 e 1607 del padre Matteo Ricci della Compagnia di Giesu al molto R.P. Claudio Acquaviva generale della medesima* (Annuals for 1606 and 1607 by Matteo Ricci of the Society of Jesus to the Father Claudio Acquaviva General of the Same Society), was published by printer Bartolomeo Zannetti in Rome, followed in 1622 by F. Nicolas Trigault J.S.'s *Entrata nella China de' padri della Compagnia del Gesù. Tolta dai commentarii del p. Matteo Ricci di detta compagnia: dove si contengono il costume, le leggi, et ordini di quel Regno, ei principii difficilissimi della nascente Chiesa, descritti con ogni accuratezza, e con molta fede* (Entry to China by the Father of the Society of Jesus. Extracts from the Commentaries by F. Ricci of That Society Dealing with the Customs, Laws and Orders, and Very

3 As far as I was able to establish at the time of this research, no other publication concerning Matteo Ricci was compiled by a secular author prior to Nocentini's (1882) work.

4 Among the most important, albeit different contributions on the subject, see Spence (1984), Fontana (2005; 2010), Mungello (1989, 44–73) and Romano (2020, 105–166).

Difficult Start of the Newly Established Church, Described with Fine Details, and True Faith) by Neapolitan printer Lazzaro Scoriggio. Subsequently some extracts were published in *Regni Chinensis descriptio. Ex varijs authoribus* by Elzevir in Leiden in 1639. This was a reprint of the first book of the compilation put together by Nicolas Trigault in 1622. Finally, the Latin version of Trigault's book, *De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas ab Societate Jesu*, first issued in the 1610s, was republished in Cologne as late as 1684 by Wiedenfelt and de Berges.

Not one work on Matteo Ricci was published or reprinted during the eighteenth century.5 Whilst the eighteenth century is known as the silver age of travel literature, it was also the century of the Enlightenment, the century of the Chinese Rites controversy and the century in which the old Society of Jesus was suppressed. It was a complex period, and the literary silence was a consequence of this complexity. In 1742, Pope Benedict XIV put an end to the Rites controversy with the *Ex quo singulari* bull. The bull affirmed that the "Chinese Rites", traditional Chinese practices of ancestor veneration which Ricci and his Jesuit followers accepted as cultural rather than religious, were in fact of a religious nature. Consequently, ancestor veneration was banned as un-Christian, dealing a major blow to the policy of accommodation implemented by Jesuit missionaries in China since Ricci. The Jesuits were also obliged to take an oath not to discuss the topic further.6 The papal bull took the first step towards the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIII in 1767, which initially targeted Jesuits in France, Spain, Portugal, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, and from 1773, through the *Dominus ac Redemptor* bull promulgated by Pope Clement XIV, everywhere apart from Russia. The suppression of the religious order in France was a facet of the entangled history of the Jesuits and the Enlightenment, as explained by Jeffrey Burson (2013) in his analysis of the polemic between Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier and Voltaire. France was the birthplace of the Enlightenment, and, as expressed in his *Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations* (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations), it is well known that Voltaire was fascinated by China, so much so that he could be defined as a Sinophile. Voltaire was fascinated by Chinese antiquity and what he perceived to be China's supposedly superior moral and philosophical Weltanschauung. He admired China's enlightened absolutism and like Leibniz "maintained (at least nominally with the Jesuits) the Chinese were theists" (Burson 2013, 15).7 While at the antipodes of Enlightenment thought, both Bergier and Voltaire were convinced that China was a theist country, as their respective Welt-

5 There are no publications on Ricci during the eighteenth century except a republication in Chinese 经天该 (*Jing tian gai*) by 聽彝堂藏板 (Ting yi tang cang ban) published in Jiaqing between 1796 and 1819.

6 For a comprehensive account of the Chinese Rites controversy, see Criveller (2012).

7 Burson (2013, 17) explains that "Voltaire's *Essai sur les mœurs* affirmed that the major discrepancy intimated in the Hebrew version of the Old Testament suggested that sacred history was no model for universal history, and that the Chinese tradition actually reflected an older and far superior tradition of ancient history."

anschauungen were "shaped by critical engagement with the very same travel literature about non-Western 'others'" (Burson 2013, 22), including Jesuit literature and the work of Matteo Ricci.

Religious accounts such those of Matteo Ricci belong to travel literature, a genre that evolved over the centuries and "attained much greater respectability, certainly a popularity and a usefulness" in the eighteenth century, even though in actual fact "many of the most readable, influential, and justifiably popular travel writers came before […] Defoe" (Adams 1978, 488). These included Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci. According to Percy Adams:

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [were] the Silver Age of Travel and Travel Literature; for from 1600, merchants, explorers, ambassadors, soldiers, scientists, Grand tourers, and missionaries roamed the earth and wrote their letters, journals, or other accounts in order to satisfy the demands of their superiors—as with East India merchants or Jesuit scholar-evangelists—to satisfy their own pleasure or vanity […] or, as with most, simply to profit financially from publishers eager to satisfy the great public demand for travel books of any kind (Adams 1978, 489).

Therefore, the absence of literature about Matteo Ricci is even more conspicuous in a century in which attention turned towards travel literature informed by non-western "others", particularly when one of its most prominent writers, Voltaire, was a Sinophile. According to Adams (1985, 147), it was "the influence of religion on the traveller's perception … [with its] pervasiveness and complexity" that discredited the Jesuits and led to the Chinese Rites controversy. For instance, "Jesuits in China—from Matteo Ricci in the late sixteenth century to Louis Le Comte at the end of the seventeenth century—made Confucius almost a Christ and often lauded the Chinese way of life over that at home" (Adams 1985, 147). Despite the Jesuits' influence over Enlightenment philosophers "with Voltaire and the *Encyclopédistes* still quoting Le Comte after mid-century" (Adams 1985, 147), these accounts tended to discredit the Jesuits in the eyes of the church. So, paradoxically, the Jesuits who were the source of inspiration for Enlightenment philosophers disappeared for the very reason that the church was uncomfortable with the implications of their ideas. Furthermore, the fact that historically, Voltaire's *Essai* is much better known than Bergier's *Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion* (1780) highlights the linearity of narrative construction, which conceals an alternative point of view espoused by theists such as Bergier or the Jesuits who supported the French Royal family rather than Enlightenment-inspired reformists or revolutionaries. Burson explains that linearity belies a "more complex reality too often forgotten in the thick of historiographical controversy" (2013, 7), and so the eighteenth-century literary oblivion surrounding Matteo Ricci becomes the very embodiment of the association of the Enlightenment spirit with the Age of Reason, to the detriment of religion understood as a system of beliefs with a transcendental eschatology.

In contrast, the following century saw the reappearance of publications on Matteo Ricci, who has remained a subject of interest ever since. Nevertheless, before Nocentini's publication in 1882, only three other works had appeared. The first of these was printed in Macerata and the title is self-explanatory: *Elogio di Matteo Ricci maceratese della Compagnia di Gesu recitato nell'adunanza dei Catenati la sera dei 3 settembre 1819* (Eulogy of Matteo Ricci Native of Macerata of the Society of Jesus Recited to the Assembly of the Academy of the Catenati on the Evening of 3 September 1819), by Giovanni Accoretti. Then two other publications, one by Michele Ferrucci, provided treatments of Ricci's own texts: *Dell'amicizia breve trattato del P. Matteo Ricci della Compagnia di Gesù* (On Friendship. A Short Treaty by F. Matteo Ricci of the Society of Jesus), published in 1825 to celebrate the marriage of Marquis Domenico Ricci Petrocchini and Ms Elisa Graziani from Macerata; and in 1853 the reprint of Ricci's *Trattato della Politica di Aristotele: Volgarizzato dal greco per Matteo Ricci con note e discorso preliminare* (Politics by Aristotle: Vulgarized from the Greek by Matteo Ricci with Notes and Preliminary Speech). The publications by Accoretti and Ferrucci came some years after the restoration of the Jesuit order in 1814,8 and both were connected to local events: the former to the assembly of one of most prestigious and long-lived Italian cultural associations established in Macerata in 1574,9 the latter to the marriage of a Ricci family descendant. Thus, Nocentini's publication was the first scholarly treatment of the figure and legacy of Matteo Ricci in over a century and can be seen as initiating the revival of interest in the figure.

# 3. The rereading theories of Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov