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This article examines extended debates after World War II over the repatriation of Italian civilians from Albania, part of the Italian fascist empire from 1939 until 1943. Italy's decolonization, when it is studied at all, usually figures as rapid and non-traumatic, and an inevitable byproduct of Italy's defeat in the war. The tendency to gloss over the complexities of decolonization proves particularly marked in the Albanian case, given the brevity of Italy's formal rule over that country and the overwhelming historiographical focus on the Italian military experience there. In recovering the complex history of Italian and Albanian relations within which negotiations over repatriation occurred, this article demonstrates the prolonged process of imperial repatriation and its consequences for the individuals involved. In some cases, Italian citizens, and their families, only “returned” home to Italy in the 1990s. The repatriation of these “remainders” of empire concerned not only the Italian and Albanian states but also local committees (notably the Circolo Garibaldi) and international organizations, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In recuperating this history, the analysis rejects seeming truisms about the forgotten or repressed memory of Italian colonialism. Drawing upon critical theories of “gaps,” the article addresses the methodological challenges in writing such a history.

Although Italian colonialism began to claim scholars' attention in a systematic way from the 1970s on, colonialism's epilogue—decolonization—remains largely ignored for the Italian case. What scholarship has been produced on the decolonization process after fascism's defeat tends either to focus on the details of the international treaty debates by which Italy's former possessions received independence or became trusteeships (the domain of diplomatic history), or to consider whether Italy constitutes a “postcolonial” space (the realm of cultural studies). Analyses of the latter variety note the general lack of public consciousness about Italy's colonial past or postcolonial present. Pinkus, for example, describes the cultural consequences of decolonization in terms of a nonevent: “The term nonevent suggests, indeed, that the lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages has contributed to the lack of a full-scale national reevaluation of the country's colonial past.” In an evocative analysis, Pinkus interprets Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse (The eclipse) as symptomatic of the eclipsing of the memories of colonialism's end. In the postwar period, she claims, such memories became displaced onto Italy's “conquest” of its urban peripheries (Italy's “deserts”) and their transformation into large-scale residential neighborhoods. Yet Pinkus conflates the recent silence about decolonization with silence about decolonization at the time of events, assuming the “lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages.” One visible (at least at the time, if not subsequently) and little explored aspect of the “trauma” of decolonization was the repatriation of Italian nationals from the ex possedimenti, or former possessions.