Abstract
Scholars periodically return to the study of how French administrators and architects handled urban settings in North Africa, beginning with the occupation of Algiers in 1830. Italian occupation of Libya began much later, in 1911, but in the thirty-two years of their effective rule, Italians also had sufficient time to be both destructive and constructive in significant ways. In this chapter, I discuss attitudes to the walled city of Tripoli on the part of military personnel, government bureaucrats, and planners—the people who decided how to reshape Tripoli, and whose voices fill the documents in the archives of the colonial administration. In these policies, I read what looks like Italian actions leading to the relative preservation of Tripoli’s walled city as a series of planning choices that were, in reality, more passive than active. There was no detailed program to preserve old Tripoli, but decisions were made to shore it up just enough so that the city would require the least attention and investment possible. The Italian treatment of Tripoli’s walled city is thus a negative instance of preservation policy, or a case of preservation by default.
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Notes
François Béguin, Gildas Baudez, Denis Lesage, and Luden Godin, Arabisames, décor architectural et tracé urbain en Afrique du Nord 1830–1950 (Paris: Dunod 1983), 13 and 20. For more information on these issues, see my eponymous article published in The Journal of North African Studies vol.5, no. 4 (2000): 121–154, from which this chapter is drawn.
Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat. Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1980);
Paul Rabinow, French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1989); and
Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
See Gaspare Messana, “La Medina di Tripoli,” Quaderni dell’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Tripoli (nuova serie) 1 (1979): 6–36, for the history of Tripoli’s morphology since its origins; and Muhammad Warfelli, “The Old City of Tripoli,” in Some Islamic sites in Libya: Tripoli, Ajdabiyah and Ujlah, a special supplement to Art and Archaeology Research Papers 9 (1976): 2–18. Also see
Nora Lafi, Une ville du Maghreb entre ancien régime et réformes ottomanes. Genèse des institutions municipales à Tripoli de Barbarie (1795–1911) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), on the social and institutional history of the city prior to Italian occupation.
This “Negro village” usually appeared in pre-1911 travelers’ chronicles, rather than Italian government documents. It was mentioned as late as 1925: see Gordon Casserley, “Tripolitania, where Rome Resumes Sway,” National Geographic 48, no. 2 (August 1925): 131–161; 157.
The most detailed works on this subject are Marida Talamona, “Addis Abeba capitale dell’Impero,” Storia contemporanea 16, no. 5–6 (1985): 1093–1130;
Marida Talamona, “La Libia: un laboratorio di architettura,” (Rassegna) 51, no. 3 (1992): 62–79;
Marida Talamona, “Città europea e città araba in Tripolitania,” in Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, ed. Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, 257–277 (Venice: Marsilio, 1993); and
Ornella Sangiovanni, “La Medina di Tripoli. Dal piano regolatore del 1912 ai lavori del 1936–37,” Islam. Storia e civiltà 9, no. 1 (January–March 1990): 49–61.
See Maurizio De Rege, “Il nuovo piano regolatore di Tripoli,” Urbanística 3 (1934): 121–128.
Shirine Hamadeh, “Creating the Traditional City. A French Project,” in Forms of Dominance. On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, ed. Nezar AlSayyad, 241–259 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), 253.
Some buildings were torn down for reasons of public safety. A few such demolitions took place after 1922 in the Jewish quarter, in the western, and poorer, part of the old city. See Luigi V. Bertarelli, Guida d’Italia del Touring Club Italiano. Possedimenti e colonie, Isole Egee, Tripolitania, Cirenaica, Eritrea, Somalia (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1929), 251.
See David Atkinson, “Nomadic Strategies and Colonial Governance: Domination and Resistance in Cyrenaica, 1923–1932,” in Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance, ed. Joanne P. Sharp, Paul Routledge, Chris Philo, and Ronan Paddison, 93–121 (London: Routledge, 2000).
The arch was the subject of many celebratory publications, such as Salvatore Aurigemma, L’arco di Marco Aurelio e di Lucio Vero a Tripoli (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1938).
Luigi Luiggi, “Le opere pubbliche a Tripoli. Note di viaggio,” Nuova Antología 242 (March–April 1912): 115–130; see 115 and 127.
Angelo Pìccioli, “La rinascita della Libia sotto il regime fascista,” in L’impero coloniale fascista, ed. Mario Giordano, 461–496 (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini, 1937), 474.
For a range of discussions of post-1929 approaches to Tripoli and architectural theorizations, see: Mia Fuller, “Building Power: Italian Architecture and Urbanism in Libya and Ethiopia,” in Forms of Dominance. On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, ed. Nezar AlSayyad, 211–239 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992);
Krystyna von Henneberg, “Piazza Castello and the Making of a Fascist Colonial Capital,” in Streets. Critical Perspectives on Public Space, ed. Zeynep Çelik, Diane Favro, and Richard Ingersoll, 135–150 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
Mia Fuller, “Carlo Enrico Rava, the Radical: First Formulations of Colonial Rationalism,” Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 15–16, no. 1–2 (1994–1995): 150–159;
Brian L. McLaren, “Carlo Enrico Rava—’Mediterraneità’ and the Architecture of the Colonies in Africa,” Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 15–16, no. 1–2 (1994–1995): 160–173;
Krystyna von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties: Architectural Syncretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (1996): 373–395;
Krystyna von Henneberg, “The Construction of Fascist Libya: Modern Colonial Architecture and Urban Planning in Italian North Africa (1922–1943)” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996); Brian L. McLaren, “Mediterraneità and Modernità. Architecture and Culture during the Period of Italian Colonization of North Africa” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001); and Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, in press).
On archeology, architecture, and planning in the Dodecanese Islands, see Leonardo Ciacci, Rodi Italiana 1912–1923. Come si inventa una città (Venice: Marsilio, 1991);
Monica Livadiotti and Giorgio Rocco, eds., La presenza italiana nel Dodecaneso tra il 1912 e il 1948: La ricerca archeologica, La conservazione, le scelte progettuali (Catania: Edizioni del Prisma, 1996); and
Simona Martinoli and Eliana Perotti, Architettura coloniale italiana nel Dodecaneso 1912–1943 (Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1999).
See Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870–1950. Traffic and Glory (Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1973), on demolitions throughout Rome starting in 1870. For this particular distinction, see 14.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990), 18.
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© 2005 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
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Fuller, M. (2005). Preservation and Self-Absorption: Italian Colonization and the Walled City of Tripoli, Libya. In: Ben-Ghiat, R., Fuller, M. (eds) Italian Colonialism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_12
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