ABSTRACT
This essay analyses Italian colonialists’ attitudes towards, and interventions in, the walled city of Tripoli (Libya), partly in light of the well-established scholarship on French colonial practices elsewhere in the Maghrib. It concludes that while Italian policy did relatively little permanent damage to the old city – in comparison to the French demolitions in Algiers, and to those of Italian administrators in Italy and in other Italian colonies – we should not necessarily derive from this that Italians were the ‘better colonisers’. Instead, the essay suggests that as Italian planners were more interested in Roman remains than in the vestiges of other eras, and more interested in creating new European quarters than in becoming familiar with how Libyans lived, the partial survival of the walled city was not so much due to an active preservationist agenda as it was an effect of Italian self-absorption.
