"Il Sahàra italiano". The exploration of the Libyan Sahara during the Italian Colonial period and the rediscovery of the Garamantes

During the Italian Colonial period in Libya the Sahara desert represented a challenge both in terms of its military and political control and in terms of grasping the cultural complexity of a region, which differed greatly from the Mediterranean area. If in the coast of Tripolitania imposing archaeological remains dated to the Roman empire were ideologically used as tools for the colonial occupation, the Sahara represented an almost unknown territory, in which, contemporary to the Roman period, a kind of “mythical” and “evanescent” population - “the Garamantes” – manifested themselves, from time to time, in the ancient Greek and Latin sources. The article deals with the early explorations of the Fazzan by the Italian colonial government, which followed the fate of the military occupation, and slowly brought to the earliest scientific archaeological campaigns in the Garamantian heartland (1933-34), providing proper excavation data for a historical reconstruction of the Garamantian kingdom. The ideological framework of the Fascist regime made use of the “Romanità” also in the interpretation of the Saharan history, and the Garamantes were inserted into the wider civilizing sphere of influence of the Roman empire. Only in the last two decades, thanks to two long-termed archaeological projects in the wadi el-Ajal and in the wadi Tanezzuft, the Garamantes gained back their place and proper role in the Saharan history.