To anyone looking for historical interconnections between Italy and other world regions, the Horn of Africa surely represents an essential point of reference. This book investigates the long history of cultural encounters between these two regions – a history populated by missionaries, travellers and scholars who not only moved from Europe to the Horn of Africa, but also the other way around. The book begins with the newly established Kingdom of Italy launching its colonial policy with the conquest of territories on the Red Sea coast. Scholarship on Italy's colonial past is still a relatively small field, meaning that despite major advances in research over the last 30 years – especially in the field of postcolonial studies and memories – much work still waits to be done. This makes the book edited by Brioni and Bonsa Gulema all the more valuable.

The book consists of 11 chapters, written by authors with different scholarly backgrounds. The most common expertise among them seems to lie in the fields of literature and (African) history. A scarcely analytical, but informative and up-to-date Introduction opens the collection. In it, the book is labelled as ‘multidisciplinary’ (p. 28), characterised by a strong transnational commitment. The reader should, therefore, look for transnational analyses not only in the third section of the book, entitled ‘Transnationalism’, because this analytical position also informs the previous sections, ‘Colonialism’ and ‘Postcolonialism’. The editors advise readers to find their own individual reading paths through the book, since the disciplinary boundaries of the sections are flexible.

Part One centres on the topics of law and landscape and analyses, on the one hand, the construction of an ideological and political legitimation of colonialism based on ethnocentric legal norms (Olindo De Napoli), and on the other, representation of Somali landscapes in the words of contemporary Italian authors, which was related to a process of acquisition through the denial of the local circumstances and actors (Wu Ming 2). Part Two navigates different topics, ranging from history to decolonisation through (Ethiopian) nationalism, racism, and the like. In this section the complex interplay of colonial and postcolonial history is nicely retraced in, for example, the case of the Garesa Museum in Mogadishu (Lee Cassanelli). This museum was established by the Italian Fascist regime in 1934 as part of an imperialist project that sought to instrumentalise the past for political reasons, but it continued to be used well after the end of imperial rule, especially during the authoritarian regime of Mohamed Siyad Barre (1969–1991), with a similar – and also contested – narrative of Somalia's progress and commitment to one Somali nation. The added value of this section is that it highlights the role of colonial subjects and gives them voice in the context of the history narrated, for example through the analysis of Amharic literary production on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia published after 1941 (Sara Marzagora). This chapter vividly portrays a cultural production well integrated in the Ethiopian nationalistic narrative of the period, but at the same time diverse and nuanced. Considering the readers of this Amharic literary production – basically the Amharic-speaking, educated urban elite – the author of the essay underlines the centrality of imperial Ethiopia rather than the Italian occupation: other histories and geographies were mentioned only with regard to Ethiopia. In this sense, the Amharic works analysed in this chapter undermine ‘the centrality that postcolonial studies tend to give to European colonialism in the history of the Global South’ (p. 164). Another close view of local circumstances is offered in the chapter on the history of mixed-race children (meticci) from Somalia, exposed to racial prejudice both in colonial and postcolonial Somalia and in postcolonial Italy – an example of the continuity of discrimination despite the formal end of colonial power (Antonio M. Morone).

In conclusion, the last section, which is strongly embedded in today's world, centres on the memory of colonialism as seen from different perspectives and in different contexts. Wondering whether the Italian case can be spoken of as a postcolonial migration, the essay devoted to the topic of diaspora, based on interviews with Eritrean migrants, convincingly speaks of a reciprocal amnesia, both on the Eritrean and Italian side, when it comes to the colonial past (Milena Belloni). For this reason, the limited role colonial memories and Italy have in the shaping of migrants’ imaginations to some extent helps them to claim special recognition and status in Italy. But the colonial past is not a reason for young Eritreans to go to Italy, as it might be for other former European colonial empires. An unstable economy, high unemployment, and the presence of a divided diaspora community make Italy less attractive for young Eritreans; Italy is indeed rather a doorway to other destinations.

After reading the volume the reader might have the impression that, despite its intention, the book is in actuality less multidisciplinary than it claims to be. Classes on cultural history of Italian colonialism will have in it a reliable working tool. The merit of this book is the attempt, which succeeds in some chapters better than others, to retrace colonial and postcolonial cultural relations between the Horn of Africa and Italy, paying attention to the racial dimension which shaped them and to the interplay of other elements, with all their ambivalence, complexities and nuances.