ABSTRACT
Martini’s appointment was surprising: although a long-standing member of parliament, he was no administrator and his African ‘expertise’ amounted to those few weeks he had spent in Eritrea in 1891 investigating the Massawa ‘scandals’. However, he had shown a keen interest in Italy’s African vicissitudes and since Dogali had always been prepared to defend the principle if not the style of Italian expansionism.2 He wrote some excellent prose about Affrica, as he liked to call that continent with his Tuscan inflections, but was, on the face of it, hardly a suitable candidate for the onerous job of colonial administrator after the great disaster. One wonders how many established authors of plays, poetry and belle lettres in other empires became colonial governors, especially of a colony so devoid of oriental splendour and so lacking in literary inspiration as Eritrea. Yet Martini possessed qualities that were rare among the Italian literati of the late nineteenth century and that with good effect could be transferred to ‘saving’ the colony which, so flooded with the rhetoric of national greatness and martial glory, had due to defeat shaken the Italian psyche. His temperate pen, modest manners, his irony and the great pride he took in his ‘Tuscan common sense’ would prise the colony from the clutches of the army which had made of Eritrea a testing ground for Carduccian and Crispian folly or the hyperbole of a Scarfoglio. As Martini wrote of fellow poet Giuseppe Giusti, also from Tuscany, insisting on that region’s immunity to the Italian proclivity for literary exaggeration and puffed up overstatement: ‘he possessed an equilibrium of the mind like that of our own Tuscany, which, after having irradiated the world with the light of genius, is now happy to reserve for itself, and takes pride in doing so, the practice of common sense.’3
