Genoa, summer 1907. Commanded by Mattia Giavotto, the Italian Royal Navy hydrographic survey ship La Staffetta leaves Italy for an expedition along the Horn of Africa.
The CrewLaunched in 1876, the Italian Royal Navy Ship La Staffetta was stationed along the coast of the Horn of Africa from 1891 to 1899, essentially to protect Italy's colonial interests in Italian Eritrea and Somaliland. Between 1900 and 1902 it was transformed into a hydrographic vessel and used to conduct survey and scientific research in the Red Sea and the coastal waters of East Africa. It was scrapped after World War I.
A visual record of the survey journey of La Staffetta which lasted from 1907 to 1909 was kept by Marcello Calvitti. He collected 280 gelatin silver prints and 8 albumen prints in two photographic albums, both with handwritten captions in Italian and a penned title on the second leaf of each album. In addition to photographs presumably taken by Calvitti himself, the collection includes photographs by Adelphoi Zangaki and A. Antippa of Port Said, H.K. Binks of Nairobi, and J.M.C. of Aden. Bound in album no. 2 is a souvenir viewbook with 24 collotype reproductions of photographs, titled: Souvenir of Uganda.
The Italian presence in Africa was not new at the time; it dated back to the mid-19th century, when Italian explorers like Orazio Antinori and Pietro Sacconi travelled extensively in the region of the Horn of Africa. While the explorers undertook their journeys for scientific purposes, the newly-formed Kingdom of Italy gladly infused these missions with an aura of propaganda. The killing of explorer Gustavo Bianchi during a mission in the Danakil Desert in 1884 was taken as a pretext to favor the Italian occupation of Massawa’s harbor, which was then declared an Italian Protectorate. In 1890, Massawa and the newly occupied nearby highlands were consolidated into Italy’s first colony, Eritrea. At the same time Italy had started another colonial campaign in Ethiopia, which resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Italian Army at Adwa in 1896.
L’ ILLUSTRAZIONE ITALIANA, VITTORIO BOTTEGO
As La Staffetta was beginning its journey, a monument to the explorer Vittorio Bottego was inaugurated in Parma. Born in 1860, Bottego was raised with the myth of the explorer, created in those years after the first European colonial conquests. In 1897, he undertook an expedition to the Galla region of Ethiopia, dying in a battle. The funereal monument represents Bottego standing with his sword; at his feet, the Jubba and the Omo, the two rivers he had explored.
In August 1907 the explorers left Port Said, embarking on a trip that would last 2 years.
Sailing down the Suez Canal, La Staffetta stopped in the Italian port of Massawa, the British port of Aden, and in the recently purchased city of Mogadishu, the capital of the newly established Italian Somaliland. After Mogadishu, La Staffetta arrived in the British East African port of Mombasa, from where a representative party proceeded inland to visit Nairobi and Entebbe in the British colonies of Kenya and Uganda. Eventually, the expedition completed its journey in the island Sultanate of Zanzibar.
Twenty years after Italy’s first colonial forays in Africa, the indissoluble link between exploration, diplomacy and military missions had not yet vanished: officially classified as a hydrographic mission, the journey of La Staffetta combined both scientific and diplomatic purposes.
The albums present a rich record of the scientific dimension of the expedition. Calvitti documents the measuring instruments: see this striking photograph of a preparatory test of the engineer's surveying tool in Genoa; or the photograph of a radio-telegraphic engine in Mogadishu. Machines like this resemble Jules Verne’s mysterious devices in their mixture of scientific and fantastic elements. There are records of surveying expeditions inland which resemble beach parties and visits to British-ruled territories, like the port city of Aden in Yemen, to tour recently constructed waterworks and dams. Italians were very keen on visiting English colonies, in order to learn from the British experience.
As mentioned, La Staffetta’s journey had a diplomatic dimension as attested by this series of photographs depicting the visit of the Duchess Elena d’Aosta and a group of illustrious guests aboard of the ship. Elena d’Aosta was a descendant of the D’Orleans family who married Emanuele Filiberto of Aosta in 1895. She was a polyglot and passionate traveller, often stopping at embassies. She travelled along the African continent, and wrote several books (including Viaggi in Africa [African Travels] and Attraverso il Sahara [Through the Sahara]) about her experience.
The visit of the Duchess The Duchess with the Sultan of ZanzibarThe photographer captured various moments of the journey, including life during the navigation, landing and exploration, and the encounter with the natives. Calvitti’s captions are often ironic, as in the example of a camel presented as a “great philosopher.”
As the trip proceeded, La Staffetta stopped in the Italian colony of Massawa.
On the way to Mogadishu, La Staffetta seems to have gotten involved in a series of military engagements along the coast of the Italian Somaliland, one of which was the bombing of Danane, photographically recorded in the album.
This military operation was featured almost contemporaneously in the March 10, 1907 issue of L’Illustrazione Italiana. The picture on the cover shows some members of the Bismul tribe, which was eventually defeated by the Italians.
Other hints of the military nature of La Staffetta’s expedition are contained in a series of photographs depicting the “Defense of Merca” (the Somali port of Marka), fortifications and encampments of the Askari (native soldiers) as well as the photograph of a stop in December 1908 at Aden for “the enlisting of Arabs for the Benadir” (the coastal region of Somalia).
Defense of Merca Enlisting of Arabs for the Benadir. Aden, December 1908. Captain Crispi, Doctor Gualdi, Doctor Rana.For one of the photos, Calvitti wrote an ironical caption which stated that a picture, obviously a photomontage, depicting two zebras, one attacked by a lion, was taken “dal vero,” the Italian equivalent of “from life.” This ironical notation highlights one characteristic pervading all the photographs of the two albums, namely the constant weaving together, even in the most plainly documentary images, of reality and fantasy.
The visual testimony of La Staffetta’s historical expedition strongly resonates with the Italian imaginary of Africa crafted by two significant artists and intellectuals, the nineteenth century adventure novelist Emilio Salgari and the twentieth century cartoonist Hugo Pratt.
The spirit of adventure embodied in the novels of Jules Verne and Karl May found an Italian interpreter in Emilio Salgari (1862-1911). Characterized by a melodramatic and redundant prose, he was incredibly productive, writing 3-4 novels per year. He wrote several cycles of adventure stories, most famously I Pirati della Malesia (The Pirates of Malaysia). Even though his African stories are less well known, his exoticizing gaze is apparent from the two covers in display, namely I Predoni del Gran Deserto (The Predators of the Great Desert) and La Giraffa Bianca (The White Giraffe).
A curious mixture of a sailor, a pirate and a gentleman, Corto Maltese is without doubt Hugo Pratt’s most famous character. From his first appearance (1967), he immediately made an impression on the readers, becoming the main protagonist of stories that would lead him, respectively, through Japan, the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, Ireland, Venice and, of course, Africa. Maltese’s biography is as blurred as that of his creator, and has to be reconstructed following the clues disseminated through his adventures. Born in Malta around 1887 to an English sailor and a Gypsy woman from Gibraltar, Corto Maltese gets his name from an Andalusian word meaning “fast in hand.” The choice of his country of origin is significant: as in the case of Emilio Salgari’s adventurers, Corto comes from an island which has always been a crossroads of cultures. In a sense, then, this background impels Maltese too to be an adventurer. After a period in the English navy, he turns to piracy, but he constantly straddles the borders between legality and illegality, and becomes friends with criminals such as Venexiana Stevenson and Rasputin. His African adventures in Ethiopia and Somalia, later collected under the name of Etiopiche, are set in the years between 1925 and 1927. While with Salgari, we saw the beginning of the “dream of colonialism,” Corto’s African adventures show an “Africa on paper,” the colonial impulse being dissolved.
The pictures of La Staffetta reveal how the Italian colonial experience was born under the legacy of British colonialism. Italians visited several English colonies such as Aden so as to learn from them. Often photographs explore comparisons between English and Italian colonial styles. See, for instance, the picture of the Englishman on the zebra and the one with the Italian carried on the sedan chair entering Mogadishu. Particularly striking is the comparison between the fast trains of Uganda with the old vehicles of Eritrea which suggests in the Italian colonial experience an aspiration to modernity which remains unfulfilled. Underneath the naive gaze of these albums lies an awareness of the violence and power of the colonial enterprise, as shown from the picture of the hanged men (note the caption: “The English justice”).
Ferrovia Eritrea Railway in Erithrea La ferrovia dell’Uganda “Railway in Uganda” English Justice: Four hangings in Mombasa, August 1908A record of inland expedition in Kenya and Uganda of the Staffetta crew is a souvenir booklet inserted in the second photographic album of the Staffetta, entitled Souvenir of Uganda. To see the full gallery of these images, click here or visit the gallery.
While at times playful and fanciful, Calvitti’s photographs show an exoticizing gaze, which reveals the predatory nature of the European presence in Africa (“What a sinister thing”—wrote Michel Leiris—“it is to be Europeans!”). In a similar way, the reality of political and historical violence lurks behind the apparent naiveté of the fictional world of adventure stories: as a journalist, Emilio Salgari was an early supporter of an Italian military invasion of Libya. In an article entitled "L'Italia a Tripoli", published in La Nuova Arena, January 5 1885, Salgari writes: “Italy should go Tripoli, not in order to formally conquer it, but to reinstate on the throne the son and nephew of Jusef Pascià [Yusuf Pasha], gaining in this way the high Protectorate of this lavishly rich (‘ubertosissimo’) territory. Far from resisting to our occupation, the whole population would bless the Italian flag recognizing in it a symbol of liberation. The Karamanli prince and his subjects will be happy to conquer once again their independence with the simple gesture of handing over to us the vast virgin territories, the rights to the harbours, to the unexplored and under utilized mines, to the construction of railroads and telegraphs; gestures that, in the final analysis, would simply work out in their own interest. In this way Italy, besides freeing a population betrayed, downtrodden, exploited, would become the owner of a fertile region situated at the heart of the Mediterranean, which should be an Italian lake and that instead belongs to everybody, except to Italy.”[In “L’Italia e gli Italiani nelle opere di Emilio Salgari” Corinne D’Angelo web site Belphegor maggio 2006, sul Vol. V, No. 2 ]
This delusionally naive notion of colonialism will be portrayed in Salgari’s 1896 novel I Robinson Italiani, the story of a group of settlers who peacefully develop a happy and thriving colony. But Salgari’s narrative tropes dangerously resonate with the later rhetoric of aggression and conquest which defined the colonial politics of both Liberal and Fascist Italy.
The interest of the young Italian nation in the British colonial experience is directly reflected in the fictional worlds of Salgari and Pratt, as both authors relied on foreign--often British--heroes for their various colonial adventures. While this made sense for stories set in faraway British territories such as India, Malaysia or the Pacific islands, however even for stories set in North and East Africa where Italy had its own colonial holdings, no Italian ever appears. As if to avoid a direct confrontation with the Italian colonial experience, both artists generally preferred to feature foreign heroes (French, British or German), and generally to steer away from the African continent as a primary setting for their tales.
While Salgari never even set foot on a boat and his only journey was from his native Verona to Turin, Hugo Pratt was first introduced to the world of adventure as a child-soldier, who in 1936 followed his father in Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. Born in Venice, Pratt spent his late childhood in Ethiopia, where his father was a member of the African Italian Police. In 1941, Pratt’s family was deported to a concentration camp, where his father died. Eventually, the young Hugo joined the British forces serving as translator and scout. Differently from Salgari, Pratt’s fantasy draws heavily from his personal experience under Fascism; distancing itself from the exotic descriptions of the late 19th century, it faces, albeit with apparent naiveté, the violence of the history of the 20th century.
This map was produced in 1936 after Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and declaration of the empire. The Africa orientale economica (Economic East Africa) is depicted as a happy reservation of cute exotic animals and resources; no trace is left of its human inhabitants.