“This Is Your Fourth Shore”: Historical Amnesia and the Return of the Colonial Past in Antonio Tabucchi’s Piazza d’Italia

Abstract

Antonio Tabucchi’s first novel, Piazza d’Italia (1975), is a sweeping historical panorama of modern Italy, from the country’s unification in the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War, seen from the viewpoint of a Tuscan family at the margins of society.  With a cast entirely comprised of antiheroes, social outcasts, and failed revolutionaries, the novel gives voice to those who are expunged from official records, in an act of defiance against dominant historical narratives. Academic discussions of Tabucchi’s work have nonetheless disregarded the important anticolonial subtext that permeates Piazza d’Italia. This is perhaps owing to the enduring collective amnesia surrounding Italy’s imperial past, along with the fact that colonialism is seldom overtly addressed within the novel, even if closely imbricated with other forms of violence more familiar to Italian-reading audiences. The character of Asmara most strikingly typifies this conflation of violent histories inasmuch as she represents both a figure of female alterity and of colonial otherness. Similarly, the chapter “La quarta sponda” parallels the trauma of German occupation during World War II with the Italian invasion of African territories under Fascism.  This article will attempt to map some of the sites of encounter that Tabucchi sets up for communities of suffering in Italy and Africa. These entangled memories reveal hitherto unsuspected points of connection between domestic and colonial modes of dominance, as well as offer a space to critically engage with Italy’s past and present.