by Gianni Santamaria, Avvenire – June 14, 2025

In 1994, a group of children discovered human bones in an olive grove in Rrubjekë, a village in the hinterland of Durrës. The young Anita was frightened, but confided in her grandmother, who showed no surprise. “Italian soldiers. Just boys. Poor souls. An old story. Anyway, it doesn’t concern us.”

But the question of why those Italian boys were there never left Anita. As a student, she uncovered the traces of the fascist invasion of Albania, which began on 7 April 1939—the violence it brought, and the resistance it provoked. At the time, she was a child living with her grandparents, while her mother and brother had reached Bari in 1991 aboard the now-iconic Vlora ships. Today, Anita Likmeta is an Italian journalist and writer, awarded for her debut novel Le favole del comunismo (The Fairy Tales of Communism, Marsilio, 2024). She has chosen to return to this dark page of history in a book that is, at once, a work of memory and a protest against forgetting. L’aquila nera (The Black Eagle) dismantles the mythology of the Italian invasion of Albania, offering a warning to contemporary Europe: history is not black and white. Alongside pages that expose political cynicism—then and now—are those that resurrect unknown heroes, on both sides of the sea. That childhood memory opens L’aquila nera, newly released by Marsilio (176 pages), a work that moves between historical essay and meditation on the long, unresolved tension between two realities: the one she came from and the one she has inhabited in an Italy that has often treated her as a stranger. Italy—Likmeta recalls—saw Albanians as “invaders” in 1991, forgetting it had once imposed its own colonial dominance on the other side of the Adriatic, under the guise of protection.

“Albanians were the mirror image the fascists left behind after the war: a people shattered, worn down by the era’s brutal violence and by the memory of oppression. The Italians, without realizing it, were facing themselves.”
In this historical and existential journey, Likmeta summons the thoughts of Pasolini, Gramsci, and Carlo Levi. She portrays well-known, lesser-known, and unknown figures alike. Among them: Queen Geraldine, wife of King Zog, as a symbol of those who refuse to yield to adversity. Italian soldiers Alberto D’Andrea, Gennaro Sora, and Giovanni Rossi, who joined the Albanian resistance after 8 September. And the Albanian fighters themselves—such as the people of Shijak, remembered for their anti-fascist resistance, and Mujo Ulqinaku, who died defending Durrës on 7 April 1939. Anita passed his name every day on a plaque outside her school. That he was a hero, she learned only after asking her teacher. These pages resonate with notes that blend the political with the poetic, echoing even those of Skanderbeg—both Ulqinaku and Skanderbeg defenders of Europe. Their sacrifice, unrewarded. Today, Albania—Likmeta stresses—has become the “dumping ground” of the continent, referencing the recent transfer of migrants from Italy, an act she calls “not of welcome, but of expulsion.” Among the figures cast in a darker light is Galeazzo Ciano, who observed the internal divisions and the weakness of King Zog and exploited them in pursuit of a clear and early goal: forced annexation. The fascist strategy was to conquer the Land of the Eagles first through economic and cultural infiltration, then militarily—an effort that gave rise to an Albanian fascism of its own. The reflection unfolds in brief chapters, alternating between well-documented historical narrative and personal flashes: memories of her high school years, discovering Greek, while also experiencing marginalization and bullying; or life in 1990s Albania, marked by poverty and the nostalgia of an unfree time. As one man vented while queuing for fuel: “Wouldn’t it have been better if we had just become a region of Italy?”—a sign of a wounded people unable to find itself.

A mirror of her own journey. At fifteen, she met her father for the first time and learned she had an uncle in Italy—one Ibrahim Kodra. Only later, through a newspaper article reporting his death, did she discover who he was: one of the great artists of the twentieth century, committed to peace and reconciliation between peoples. From this awareness emerged a conviction: to find oneself, one must heal memory. Telling the story of oppression in Italian—the language of the oppressor—is, she writes, “a necessary act.” Not to build a bridge, but to remind us that broken bridges must be rebuilt on the solid ground of truth. Likmeta notes that France and Britain have begun reckoning with their pasts. And Italy? “When will it stop describing itself as a ‘lesser colonial power’? When will it stop hiding behind the rhetoric of ‘the good Italians’? When will it stop pretending the occupation wasn’t an invasion, that domination wasn’t violence?”

Albania in 1939, she writes, was “a rope stretched between past and future, a tension that still resonates.” And we, today, are walking a rope too—if not over an abyss, then across a landscape we only think we know: neatly drawn territories, safe borders, stable balances. But scratch the surface and the tensions return—not the Sudetenland or the Adriatic, but new frontiers, new frictions: economic, political, cultural. Invisible threads, still woven through a past that never truly ended, pulsing beneath the surface of a Europe that sees itself as new—but is merely dressed in a thinner, shinier skin.