Images of Otherness: Photographs of and about Italians in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between Italian Unification and the First World War. Preliminary Perspectives and Reflections.

Within the field of studies devoted to the processes of construction of Italian identity from a transnational perspective since Unification, the Mediterranean region has recently become the subject of renewed historiographical interest. Drawing on little-explored sources, but above all on unpublished materials preserved in national and foreign archives, scholars have investigated the Italian presence in the area not only with the aim of reconstructing its history, but also of analysing its different social components in greater depth (Carminati, 2021). The influence of new historiographical approaches, such as global history, including its micro-level declinations, and of theories such as postcolonial studies, has also stimulated a broader reflection which, from a long-term perspective, seeks to bring together phenomena traditionally addressed separately (Labanca, 2001). The various forms of mobility, first and foremost migration, from Italy towards the regions south and east of the Mediterranean up to and beyond the First World War, have thus been reinterpreted within a context in which the Mediterranean Sea is configured as a “colonial” space (Calafat, Grenet, 2025). Within this framework, the underlying hypothesis advanced by scholars is that the Italian “colonies” in the area played a central role in the construction of Italian national identity, serving as a privileged laboratory for the formation of otherness (Falcucci, Paonessa 2026). In support of these theoretical premises, this paper seeks to contribute to the debate by examining photography “of and about Italians” in the region between 1861 and the beginning of the occupation of Libya in 1911. As this is a preliminary and still little-explored study, its main objective is to conduct an initial survey of the public and private collections in which photographic holdings are preserved. A second objective is to develop a preliminary photographic taxonomy, in order to reflect on the typologies, functions, and modalities of the gaze of and upon Italians in the colonial Mediterranean space.