Abstract

In 1997, the President of the Italian Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, officially apologized for the Italian colonial occupation of Ethiopia and Eritrea. In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister, performed a similar act against Libya almost ten years later. Despite these official positions taken, in the same period, Italian society continued to recognize itself widely in the myth of the Italian «good colonizer». The article reconstructs and analyzes the republican origins of the «good colonizer» and suggests that the stereotype is not just an inheritance from the colonial period, but a part of the Italian identity built up in the post 1945 period.