On a sleepy Saturday morning in October, a group of Temple students and I joined a guided tour of Museum of Opacity #2: Colonial Agriculture and Architecture at the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations. Having spent nearly two months now, wandering through Rome’s imperial monuments and Renaissance piazzas, I thought I had caught a decent glimpse of the city’s relationship with power and grandeur. I was wrong.
The exhibition confronts visitors with over 12,000 objects: photographs, documents, propaganda materials, and artwork created between 1882 and 1960 to celebrate Italy’s “civilizing mission” in Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and Ethiopia. These collections, hidden from public view since 1971, now return not as celebration but as evidence. Walking through the galleries felt less like viewing art and more like entering a courtroom where history itself stands trial.
Our tour guide Lorenzo navigated us through sepia-toned photographs of colonial exhibitions—elaborate spectacles held in Genoa, Naples, Milan, and Bari where Italy displayed its overseas conquests like trophies. The 1940 First Triennial Exhibition of Italian Overseas Lands in Naples proved particularly haunting: pavilions designed to showcase agricultural bounty extracted from colonized lands, architecture that imposed European spatial logic onto African territories, and propaganda that painted exploitation as progress. These weren’t mere historical curiosities. They were sophisticated machinery of justification, transforming violence into virtue through aesthetic means.
The exhibition’s title, Museum of Opacity, suggests something profound about resistance. Where colonialism demanded transparency—mapped territories, catalogued peoples, quantified resources—opacity offers refuge. Some histories refuse easy comprehension. Some truths resist being neatly displayed behind glass.
Then Lorenzo made an observation that reframed everything: Italy today, he argued, practices colonialism within its own borders. Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s conservative government, with its roots in post-fascist movements and rhetoric that echoes Mussolini’s dreams of Italian greatness, the nation is being “colonized” by its own leadership. The same hierarchical thinking, the same exclusionary logic, the same suppression of difference that once justified Italy’s African empire now operates domestically—against immigrants, against dissenting regions, against anyone who doesn’t fit the nationalist vision.
His words resonated differently that week because Rome itself was grinding to a halt. Train and public transport strikes had paralyzed the city for days—not random disruptions, but organized resistance. Transit workers, teachers, and civil servants were walking off their jobs to protest the government’s policies on wages, labor rights, and public services. The strikes weren’t abstract political theater; they were ordinary workers using the only power they had to push back against a government they felt was abandoning them.
Standing in a museum examining colonial exploitation of labor and resources, while outside contemporary workers fought for dignity and fair treatment, the parallels became impossible to ignore. The colonial impulse to extract value while granting minimum rights hadn’t disappeared—it had found new targets closer to home.
What struck me most was the courage required to mount this exhibition now, in this political moment. The MUCIV operates under the Ministry of Culture—the same government apparatus that Lorenzo critiqued. Yet here, within an official national museum, curators created space for uncomfortable questions, for dialogue with affected communities, for progressive restitution of stolen heritage. The exhibition doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it models the difficult, ongoing work of reckoning.
Walking through Rome as a foreign student, I’d been guilty of seeing only the beauty—the Baroque fountains, the travertine columns, the golden light on ochre walls. I’d treated the city like a museum itself, a perfectly preserved artifact divorced from contemporary struggle. The soup kitchen at Termini Station had already complicated that romanticized view, showing me the food insecurity that exists alongside culinary abundance. Now the MUCIV added another layer: the colonial wealth that helped build this beautiful city, the African lives and resources extracted to fund Italian grandeur.
Standing in that gallery, I understood that studying abroad means more than appreciating art and architecture. It means asking who built these monuments, whose labor was exploited, whose stories were erased. It means recognizing that the political patterns of the past aren’t safely contained in history—they’re alive, evolving, demanding our attention. The Museum of Opacity doesn’t let visitors leave comfortable. That discomfort, I think, is exactly the point.
Check out the Temple Rome program on the Study Abroad Website to learn more about where the Rome program could take you!