Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars, by Charles Burdett

The fiction of colorblind Italy and Orio Vergani's Io, povero negro (1929)

“…With very few exceptions (Lombardi-Diop, 2005), they were all men, many of whom served as foreign correspondents for Italian newspapers and magazines. In addition to Vergani, some of the more well-known members of this writers' circle included Mario Appelius, Mario Dei Gaslini, Angelo Pìccioli, and Ciro Poggiali; Burdett addresses much of their work in his in-depth study of interwar travel writing (Burdett, 2007(Burdett, , 2018(Burdett, , 2020a(Burdett, , 2020b; see also Deplano, 2018;Polezzi, 2012). It should be noted that Vergani was, according to Sandra Ponzanesi (2004), one of the most authoritative voices in the press at the time; however, he, along with the rest of the coterie, 'fell under the spell of fascist propaganda and their articles did not have serious portraits of Africa, did not denounce the sordid aspects of colonization, but rather fell back into a process of exoticism with descriptions of nature and people which were in line with Mussolini's requirements' (Ponzanesi, 2004: 133).…”