What images of the empire did Fascism aim to promote among Italians during the Ventennio, and what political message did they convey? These are the central questions Gianmarco Mancosu addresses thoroughly in Vedere l’impero. L’Istituto Luce e il colonialismo fascista. The primary objective of this book is to analyse how the ‘realtà di celluloide delle colonie’ (p. 23) was created and disseminated, particularly through L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa – better known to the public as the Luce Institute – which served as a key mouthpiece for Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship starting in 1924. Mancosu investigates how the regime planned its propaganda, staged visual representations, and structured the discourse about Italian expansionist politics; elements that, as he highlights, held a crucial space in the considerations and operational decisions of the Fascist state. However, the author goes beyond this. In fact, in this volume, Mancosu masterfully intertwines the investigation of the mechanisms behind the production of imperial iconography with the reconstruction of both the history of Italian imperialism from the late nineteenth century to the post-Second World War era and the relationship between Fascism and mass culture.

The book is solidly based on an impressive array of written and visual archival sources – including especially newsreels, but also photographic series, scientific and war documentaries, travel accounts, and reports by political figures – which the author classifies and interprets in the light of the memories and collective imagination that Italian society retains about the colonial period. To assess the impact of Fascist colonial policies on the Italian population and political choices, Mancosu draws on the new imperial history, an analytical approach particularly well-suited to reveal the impact of empires not just on colonial territories but also within the colonising countries themselves. The transnational analytical perspective that the author employs proves especially effective for this purpose.

The volume is divided into nine chapters that follow a chronological order. Some chapters open with images from the various archives that the author has accessed; curiously, others begin with quotes from songs, films, and novels of more recent times, testifying to the lasting cultural legacy of the Italian colonial experience that persists to these days.

The first chapter serves as a prologue to the entire work, outlining how images of the Italian colonies in Somalia, Eritrea, and Libya started to circulate in Italy before the Fascist takeover in October 1922. As the author notes, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, part of the Italian liberal elite sought to promote the idea that the full realisation of national unification would require adopting a more dynamic and aggressive foreign policy. In this context, the first screenings of military and colonial-themed documentaries were organised with the aim of educating citizens in patriotism, also fuelled by the rise of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century and international reflection on its pedagogical and documentary functions. With the outbreak of the First World War, cinema became increasingly used by the state for propagandistic purposes. Thus, in November 1925, Mussolini’s government decided to establish the Luce Institute, ‘la pupilla del regime’ (p. 28), whose origins are explored in the second chapter of Mancosu’s book.

From the outset, as the author claims, the Luce Institute became a central tool for inspiring Italians’ support for Fascist colonial policies. This was made possible – as outlined in Chapter 3 – thanks to the systematic and extensive distribution of Luce films starting in the mid-1920s, when the Institute worked diligently to promote ‘la progressiva italianizzazione dell’oltremare’ (p. 140) by the new Fascist Italy. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the role of propaganda in preparing for the military intervention in Ethiopia during the early 1930s. Mancosu pays particular attention to the establishment of the Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda Africa Orientale (USPAO) in June 1935. Situated ‘al vertice del sistema informativo e propagandistico coloniale’ (‘at the peak of the colonial information and propaganda system’) (p. 177), the USPAO, however, did not always function efficiently due to tensions among the various institutional actors involved in the African front and competing with each other. The author also traces the events leading to the creation of the Reparto foto-cinematografico Africa Orientale (RAO) in Asmara in September 1935, which was responsible for coordinating propaganda at the dawn of the conquest by the Fascist empire. The contents of the propaganda related to the campaign in Abyssinia are examined in Chapter 6, which focuses on the regime’s considerable discretion in selecting the images to be disseminated to the public and the political messages to be conveyed.

Chapter 7 further develops this point by emphasising the role of the Luce Institute in idealising the Fascist imperial reality while concealing its weaknesses and its most critical aspects. Among the latter was, undoubtedly, racism, as highlighted in Chapter 8. While the Luce films never explicitly mentioned it, racism surfaced ‘indirettamente nel racconto della vita quotidiana [nelle colonie] mostrata come totalmente italianizzata’ (‘indirectly in the portrayal of everyday life [in the colonies] as completely Italianised’) (p. 350) and in the distribution of films within the empire. In fact, the organisation of the screenings took place in the strictest adherence to the racial segregation criteria imposed by the regime. The final chapter is dedicated to the decline of the imperial film production of the Luce Institute, which began at the end of 1937 with cuts to funding for the costly RAO. The latter was dissolved in June 1940, coinciding with Italy’s entry into the Second World War. As is well known, the ensuing military developments led the country and its empire to ruin. The loss of the Italian colonies between 1941 and 1943 was clumsily disguised by Fascist propaganda with the hollow promise of the imminent return of the fascio littorio in Africa. However, the end of the empire did not imply also the end of the Luce Institute, which continued to feed the memory of colonialism in republican Italy using images and films shot during the dictatorship.

In its entirety, Mancosu’s book provides a comprehensive and detailed picture of Fascist colonialism, which allows readers to critically reflect on Italy’s colonial past, appreciate its complexity, and focus on some grey areas – long neglected by scholars – to which Vedere l’impero restores historical dignity.