Collecting, transporting, and displaying an object changes its meaning. So does the way it is described, and the decision to display (or not to display) an item. Here, we trace the journeys of Robecchi Bricchetti’s collections, with a focus on their ‘afterlives’: the various meanings they have been given since they were collected over a century ago.
Selling
Robecchi Bricchetti sold various types of objects to institutions – especially to universities and museums – with the help of Italian government ministries. What fuelled the demand for ‘ethnographic’ objects from museum curators, and indeed, from the Italian state? Why might the Italian state have been interested in buying objects from current and prospective colonial territories in Africa, and what image of these territories were they trying to convey with these collections?
(Museo delle Civiltà, RomeCC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1890, Rome’s Prehistorical and Ethnographic Museum bought a selection of ‘ethnographic’ objects collected by Robecchi Bricchetti. This photograph shows another section of that museum, but gives a sense of how such collections were originally displayed.
Donating
Italy’s Fascist government designated 21 April 1926 as the country’s first ‘Colonial Day’, to be marked across the country. In Pavia, one of the main events was the opening of the Colonial Museum, largely made up of objects donated to the city by Robecchi Bricchetti.
The 1926 Colonial Day took place on the anniversary of the legendary foundation of Rome: a deliberate attempt to associate contemporary Italian colonialism with the Roman Empire. However, it was part of a concerted effort to stimulate support for colonialism across Italy, including in smaller cities like Pavia.
On Italy’s first Colonial Day, the front page of the local newspaper, Il Popolo, carried an article on “Colonial Consciousness” by Paolo Vinassa, a professor at the University of Pavia who had travelled extensively in Italian colonial territories. Alongside it was a piece describing Robecchi Bricchetti as “one of the Italian pioneers in Somalia”, and advertising the opening ceremony for the new Colonial Museum.
Displaying
Most of Pavia’s Colonial Museum was made up of objects collected by Robecchi Bricchetti. However, it also included around thirty items collected in Eritrea by Giovanni Boretti, an Italian major who led the siege of Saati in 1887, the first battle of the Italo-Ethiopian war, and around twenty items collected in Somalia by Enrico Petrella, a young pilot from Pavia, who died in a plane crash in Mogadishu in 1921.
RB 146, small woven container
This colourful woven container, collected by Enrico Petrella, was displayed alongside Robecchi Bricchetti’s collection.
Why might it have been important for the curators to display African objects from three generations of Pavia-born colonialists alongside one another? What might this have done for ‘colonial consciousness’ locally, and who was the target audience for this spectacle? What might have been the effect of these displays on those who viewed them, and what image of Africa, and the Italian presence there, did they convey?
RB 64, headrest
This wooden headrest, known as barshin, barjin, or barkin, was collected in Somalia by Enrico Petrella. Wooden headrests are used across East Africa, especially in nomadic communities.
Many museums containing objects from Somalia have headrests in their collections: including the Somali Museum in Minneapolis, North America’s only museum dedicated to Somali culture, and the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, which holds over half a million items from across the world.
Working with museum archives can shed light on how objects were used in the time and place they were acquired. This photograph shows a man carving a wooden headrest, and this series demonstrates how they are used. They were digitised by the Somali Photo Archive project, which examines photographs taken in East Africa by the English anthropologist Diana Powell-Cotton in the 1930s. Initiatives like this can introduce these archives to a wider public, including source communities. They can also improve the quality of existing archival descriptions, which are sometimes incomplete, inaccurate, or even offensive.
Present and future
A century after the Colonial Museum was founded, the material legacies of Italian colonialism are still present in Pavia, but they largely pass unnoticed. Some are subtle, like the map of Africa on Robecchi Bricchetti’s tombstone in the city cemetery. But others are substantial: the Civic Museum holds over one thousand photographs from Robecchi Bricchetti’s expeditions, and the deposits of the Kosmos Museum contains hundreds of objects he collected in Africa. Researchers can make an appointment to see them, but they have not been accessible to the public for decades.
One of our aims is to increase awareness of these overlooked histories, and to direct critical attention to this heritage. To do this, we are working on a series of events during our project: from walking tours that reveal Pavia’s colonial past, to workshops that explore the photographic archive in novel and exciting ways. What new meanings will a wider audience give to the traces of early Italian colonialism?
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- How is colonial history remembered (or forgotten)?
- What role can material culture play in telling stories about the past?
- How can we reimagine archives, museums, and visible traces of difficult histories?