The conference L'Eritrea: da Colonia “primogenita” ad oggi (Eritrea: from the “first-born” Colony to today) will be held on Friday 23 May at 5 pm at the Ateneo eCampus in via Matera 18, and will feature Professor Maria Gabriella Pasqualini, Professor Gianluigi Rossi, Professor Silvio Berardi and military historian Niccolò Lucarelli – intends to retrace the events mentioned above, also touching on the recent history of the country, which has nevertheless maintained a tenuous link to Italy. As Prince Alessio Angelo Comneno, President of the Academy, explains, «we strongly wanted to organize this series of conferences because colonialism is still a delicate issue today, with many open moral wounds; unfortunately, history cannot be erased, but we believe it is right to become aware of the mistakes of the past to build a future of dialogue and closeness between peoples».

With the purchase of Assab Bay, in Eritrea, in March 1882, the Italian colonial adventure in Africa began. The third conference of the series organized by the Angelico Costantiniana Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences is dedicated to Eritrea, with the aim of retracing historical events that are still not well known to the general public, but which have had a strong impact on recent Italian history, with echoes even in the Republican era. Events that also hide dark pages, on which it is more than ever appropriate to reflect in a historically objective way, without revisionism of any kind.

After the Bay of Assab was purchased by the government (which took over from the Rubattino Company), in 1885 the phase of the military conquest of Eritrea began, at a time when even Umberto I's Italy - which was laboriously developing its own internal economy - wanted, like the other European powers, to carve out a zone of influence in Africa that would give it political prestige and the opportunity to open new commercial markets, as well as start agricultural development programs to which Italian manpower would be allocated. After five years of war that also saw the disaster of Dogali in January 1887, in 1890 the Colony was declared, which after the discreet administrations of Martini, Salvago Raggi, Cerrina Feroni and De Camillis, who outlined the first agricultural and urban planning programs, starting in 1923 Eritrea ended up under fascist rule, which continued even more markedly on the path of modernization of the country (in particular Asmara became a laboratory of avant-garde architecture) but also launched a series of measures that heavily limited the rights of the natives, in the name of the infamous "defense of the race"; any relationship between Italians and Eritreans was also prohibited, sanctioned by the 1940 law against mixed-race people, which denied them assimilation to Italians. Then, in January 1941, the Second World War entered Eritrea, and by the following March the Royal Army definitively lost the colony at the hands of British troops. The post-war period saw Eritrea return to being part of Ethiopia, from which, after decades of tension, it gained independence in 1993.