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Focussing on a group of recent novels set against the background of Italy’s colonies in East Africa during the Fascist period, this essay aims at investigating a fundamental tension within the tradition of Italian crime fiction, and, more specifically, of historical crime fiction. On the one hand, by shedding light into the darker and less explored corners of Italy’s past, the genre aims at serving as a sort of ‘new social novel’, to paraphrase the title of a 2004 book by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò. On the other, the conventions and generic requirements of crime and detective fiction - in particular, its frequent recourse to stereotyped situations and characters - can hamper the reconstruction of complex experiences such as that of Italian colonialism. A detailed discussion of Giorgio Ballario’s novels featuring the Major of the Carabinieri Aldo Morosini (2008-2012), Davide Longo’s Un mattino a Irgalem (2001), Luciano Marrocu’s Debrà Libanòs (2002), and Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallé (2003) will show how for contemporary Italian writers, as for many authors of late 19th- and 20th-century colonial novels, Africa often continues to be an empty space upon which to project European fantasies, regardless of whether the author’s intention is a critique or a celebration of empire. Only Camilleri manages to provide a more complex account of Italian imperialism by shifting his attention from the colonies themselves to the impact of colonialism upon the ‘motherland’, thus bringing into relief the constitutive function of colonialism in the formation of Fascist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines levels of interaction and intersection between culture and justice as they are represented in some recent works of fiction and non-fiction in Italy. It looks briefly at a specific strand of crime/noir fiction to see how it can function as a vehicle for the articulation of principles of justice and ethics, before directing attention to a more in depth consideration of an equally popular, though non-fictional, genre, which pursues the same aim through the deployment of different strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representation of Bologna in Carlo Lucarelli's crime fiction. It focuses mainly on his early novels: the comic trilogy which includes Nikita (1992), Falange armata (1993) and Il giorno del lupo (1994), and on his most successful noir novel Almost blue (1997). In these crime stories, Lucarelli makes Bologna a prominent character and embarks on discussing issues of identity, social change, and urban growth. However, by drawing on traditional noir narratives, he especially elaborates his notion of Bologna's dark side, and ponders on the tensions generated by the development of new youth cultures, new metropolitan communities, and new forms of criminality. Bologna is portrayed as a disquieting noir city, but it is ultimately presented as a symbol of the postmodern metropolis (or postmetropolis): a space in transition characterized by constant transformations and elusive identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]