Now, the country is coming to terms with the fact that it, too, has stolen loot in its museum collections: the relics of a brutal colonial empire in North Africa that it hasn’t fully reckoned with. In an interview, Greco acknowledged the issue of restitution and Italy’s colonial past remains sensitive. The museum itself is something of a marvel, rebranded in 2016 as a compendium of 2 million objects from a half-dozen old collections: the Colonial Museum, Museum of Oriental Art, Museum of Medieval Art, the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum and Museum of Traditional Popular Arts. The most problematic among them is the 12,000-piece collection from the Colonial Museum, which Mussolini himself inaugurated in 1923. He says cultural audiences today no longer tolerate unethically sourced museum collections.

Source: The North Africa Journal May 10, 2023 07:05 UTC