ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Axum Obelisk, brought to Rome as war booty after Italy’s 1936 colonization of Ethiopia and finally returned in 2005 and re-erected there in 2008. Italy began its economic expansion into Africa in 1869 with much smaller colonial enterprises compared to the global empires of France and Britain. With the fall of Fascism in 1943 Italy’s colonial territories were occupied by British and French forces and, under the terms of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, Italy was made to give up all of its colonies, including those it held before the Fascist era. The first obelisk connected to Italy’s modern colonial past is part of its ancient colonial history: an Egyptian obelisk brought over by the Emperor Domitian to adorn the new Temple of Isis in the Campus Martius. Rome is riddled with vestiges of its colonial past, but Italy’s relationship with Ethiopia is portrayed as positive.
