by Matteo Marchesini, Radio Radicale – September 26, 2025

Thirty years ago, back when we were still all using stamps, one of our writers analyzed a TV series about World War II. He pointed out that, from the images selected, you’d never guess what role Italy had played. Our national shame is a repression—usually disguised as some family feud. And our Balkan imperialism gets doubly erased. 1939: the invasion of Albania, following a long siege of economic and institutional pressure, and the flight of King Zog like a more tormented, more virile Savoia. Albania is a mirror of Italy. Two young states, and at the same time, two ancient peoples, submerged by modern history just as they were trying to become nations; two countries internally divided between their northern and southern societies; and two places that, when the thin skin of the state is scraped off by trauma, revert to their feudal faces.

Fascism, a European caricature, wanted to turn Albania into its own caricature. In the 1970s, the Italian children of fascists—and of their opponents—projected onto Enver Hoxha’s temporarily pro-Chinese regime a fantasy version of Marxism-Leninism. Their children grew up while that regime’s implosion sent migrants into their streets: those from 1991, and again from 1997—marking Albania’s transition from the paranoid autarky of Sigurimi, bunkers and isolation, to the mafia anarchy of financial scams and false vaults. Were we their “Lamerica,” as in the beautiful Amelio film, notably missing the apostrophe? Surely, both fascist grandeur and Mike Bongiorno’s TV charm exerted their conflicting appeal across the sea. And yes, it’s strange to hear so many Albanians speak with flawless Italian—yet you can still tell they’re not Italian, by something subtle, almost imperceptible.

“There’s no need for coercion when the desire to belong is strong,” writes Anita Likmeta in her beautiful, hybrid essay—both historical and autobiographical—titled The Black Eagle. A Forgotten History of Fascism in Albania, published by Marsilio, like her remarkable novel The Fairy Tales of Communism.

Likmeta seems tailor-made to drive our cultural elite mad. She’s a writer and an entrepreneur. Half Muslim, half Jewish (a fact she discovered only later, since her Judaism had to be hidden). She’s a feminist and a liberal in the classical European sense—not because she spent her teen years painting banners for some imaginary communism, but because she was fleeing the bloody misery of a very real one. Her mother and siblings were on the Vlora, the rusted-out ship stuffed with an entire city’s worth of Albanians, which reached Bari in August of ’91. She herself, just a teenager, arrived in Abruzzo in 1997—another land shaped by migration—after nearly losing her life in the gun-ridden chaos of the public squares. But even earlier, Likmeta had seen the end of the old regime play out in the countryside around Durrës, amid woods and mountains where life resembled early 1900s Italy.

There, as a child playing with friends, she found the bones of our World War II soldiers. “Why had some Italian boys died in that olive grove (…) bordering my grandparents’ land? (…) I couldn’t ask my mother. She had left years before, by boat, to reach the land those boys buried in the olive grove had come from,” she writes.

And she explains the arc of history from the 1930s to the 1990s: the story of our swaggering yet frightened colonialism, and the blend of seduction and rejection it provoked. Likmeta brings into view a world still echoing with the Belle Époque: the era of Albania’s birth as a state, and of Austro-Hungarian dominance, rooted in the biography of Zog’s Hungarian wife, the noble Catholic Géraldine. A short-lived kingdom, threatened by Rome’s arrival—Rome with the ambiguous, corrupt Ciano (a German opponent), and the bait of emigration for the bourgeois youth. This is a story that, Likmeta only discovered later in life, included one of her own ancestors: Ibrahim Kodra, an avant-garde painter who studied in Italy under Fascism, only to later join the Resistance—while, in Albania, other Italians who had lost their uniforms did the same, all the more heroic for being so isolated and forgotten.

Likmeta excels at portraying her family’s ambivalence across successive regimes, and their disconnection from more natural, deep-rooted social dynamics. She brings us up to the present day, when Albania is once again a zone of traffics—sold, or selling itself—a European dumping ground for migrants, money, and illegality. The land of eagles remains, in short, the deposit for everything we’d rather not see. Case in point: we remember the Open Arms, but not the tragedy of 1997, when our navy rammed a boat full of Albanian migrants. Perhaps neither Italians nor Albanians truly understand what a “shared homeland” means: they mistake a serious, inescapable question for either cheap nationalism or shallow rejection.

This book—written by someone who’s had to carve out not one but several homelands with her bare hands—reminds us of all that, with rare dignity.