Imperialist Italian Geography currents in the work of Roberto Almagià and his ambigous relationship with the fascist regime

This paper analyses the influence of Imperialist ideas of a number of Italian geographers in the liberal monarchy and Fascist eras. Roberto Almagià’s academic and theoretical experience (1884- 1962) will be the focus of this essay, on the grounds of its great cultural prestige in Italy and abroad. While for many Italian geographers of this period the African colonies were only a secondary object of study, for Almagià not only were they an important focus after the Libyan war (1911-1912), but he also stood out as one of the greatest academic Italian colonialism propagandists at the most fiercely nationalist cultural institutes. His fervent nationalism was also influenced by his family's Risorgimento traditions. In his studies, he openly backed Italy’s geopolitical expansion, including in the Balkans. However, in the Fascist regime’s early days he openly expressed his esteem for antiFascist historian Gaetano Salvemini and this attracted the suspicions of the Fascist regime, which had him systematically spied on from 1936 onwards. The racial persecution he suffered after 1938, and his taking refuge in the Vatican to escape the Nazi roundups of Rome’s Jewish population, made him one of the most illustrious of the Italian intellectual victims of Jewish origin. This led to his cultural collaboration in the expansion policies of the Fascist regime being forgotten after World War Two.