The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in power since one year, and she has been very busy opening an exhibition in Rome about J.R.R. Tolkien (one of her old obsessions, we talked about it in one of the last interviews, here). But this is far from the only thing she has been busy with during the last 12 months. She also devoted quite some time to official visits to former Italian colonies such as Libya, Albania, and Ethiopia, discussing issues linked to energy, migrants, and infrastructures.

Last May, I went to King’s College (London) for the presentation of Marianna Griffini’s book ‘The Politics of Memory in the Italian Populist Radical Right’. It was a very interesting event, with great discussions about the contemporary far right and its selective memory of the colonial past. I revised my notes for the event’s introduction and pulished them as an article for Jacobin (here, in Italian).

Since then, the relevance of the Italian colonial past has done nothing but increasing, and it could have been hardly different with the far-right government currently in power. In this interview, we discuss with Marianna Griffini the removal of the country’s past, the role of the far right in this process, as well as current and future developments.

Enjoy the read.