Chapter 2 analyzes the cultural representations of the children born from the interracial encounters discussed in Chapter 1. By interrogating the press and some cultural productions of the period, I question especially the meaning of their representation as alien to the nation or as a “problem,” a term reminiscent of the way race mixing was described in the racist campaign of the fascist period against Jews and other “non-Aryans,” such as the Roma and Sinti. It argues that symbolically these various linguistic and cultural practices tended to exclude these children from the national community, even while stressing a sense of Christian pity for their marginalization and misery.

Chapter 3 focuses on several initiatives undertaken in the first half of the 1950s to assist the mixed-race children, showing the important role played by ecclesiastical actors in this field, and how one of these actors, who operated in close contact with the Christian Democratic government, envisaged a plan to transfer the children to a South American country once they had received an adequate education. The plan was allegedly motivated by a desire to help the children by moving them to countries where they would not stand out due to the color of their skin. In fact, the priest shared widely held prejudices about the “innate character” of the children. In the end, a newly created quasi-state agency was entrusted with supervising the assistance to the mixed-race children, while trying to distance itself from the racialized discourse about them.

The trans-Atlantic dimension of the story of the brown babies is examined in Chapter 5. African American GIs were part of a segregated army and faced extraordinary hurdles if they wanted to marry their European girlfriends. But African American communities in the United States, concerned about the destiny of the European brown babies, devised various ways of helping them. The chapter examines the debate on these issues that took place in the African American press, as well as the work of international agencies that attempted to identify the fathers of the brown babies and to find families willing to adopt the children. The chapter also looks at some initiatives undertaken by Americans of Italian descent in the United States, and at Italian mothers who were eager to migrate there to join their boyfriends or to find work and escape the stigma from their communities.

The introduction explains the subject and purpose of this study, placing it in its historiographical contexts, which includes the history of the racial identity of the Italians, the history of the continuities of fascist and colonial racism in post-fascist and post-colonial Italy, and the history of Black Italy. I illustrate the specificities of the story of the Italian “brown babies” within the larger framework of post-World War II Europe, foregrounding the persistence of racial ideology in post-fascist Italy and the continuing racial subtext of Italian national identity, in spite of the emergence of ant-iracist sensibilities. The introduction also provides an overview of the book chapters.

Chapter 7 approaches the issue of the emergence of anti-racist sensibilities in the1960s through the analysis of two films of that decade, Giovanni Vento’s Il nero and Luigi Magni’s Faustina, which either recognized or openly thematized the presence of the (former) mixed-race children in Italian society, but failed to have a significant impact and widen the understanding of Italianness. This chapter examines also the reception of these films and points out some limitations in the Italian left’s understanding of racism.

Chapter 8 goes back to Antonio Campobasso, the author of Nero di Puglia, in order to reflect on the genesis and the reception of the book and explore the identities of the war children of color through the testimonies of some members of this group whom I was able to interview. This chapter focuses in particular on the meaning of the search for their fathers and on the plural identities that they built for themselves, foregrounding the value that they assign to their African American ancestry.

Chapter 6 examines the attitudes toward the offspring of interracial unions that characterized some influential members of the Italian scientific community in the postwar years. After reviewing scientific and pseudoscientific opinions about racial mixing from the beginning of the century to the postwar period, I focus on the making of a ponderous anthropometric study on the war children of color published in 1960. Its author was Luigi Gedda, a doctor-geneticist and former president of Catholic Action, who advised Pius XII on matters of reproduction. The chapter contrasts the attitudes of Gedda and other doctors and geneticists to those of psychologists.

Drawing on institutional records and oral testimonies, Chapter 4 shows that racial beliefs and prejudices did not just exist among the educated classes, but were present also among ordinary Italians. It reconstructs the difficulties that the children had to face as they entered adolescence in the late 1950s in a society that was not particularly kind to people who looked “different” or did not profess the dominant religion. This chapter describes the attempts on the part of some social workers to shelter these children from social hostility and marginalization in the communities in which they lived, and the rather mixed results of these attempts. The difficulties of adoption are also examined, along with stories of mothers who kept the children, and who were stigmatized along with them.

In the conclusion, I link the story I tell in this book to the present, by considering in particular the genesis of the current Italian citizenship law, its disputed principles and controversial modalities of inclusion. By privileging ius sanguinis (“the right of blood”), this law has resulted in the creation of second-class citizens, as a large number of residents of foreign origins and their children have been excluded from the benefits of citizenship. This legal framework and the persisting linkage between Italianness and whiteness continues to generate exclusion and discrimination in a society that has become much more diverse than it was in the postwar period examined in the book.

Chapter 1 examines how Italians responded to the interracial encounters that took place during the war and in the immediate postwar years. In the midst of economic difficulties, fears of crime dominated public opinion, and foreigners were blamed (especially if they had a dark skin) along with the women who associated with them. The fraternization between Allied soldiers and civilians generated tensions that triggered frequent clashes between Italian men and the male occupiers, competing for the favors of Italian women. Interracial sex was often cast as a form of moral degradation, obscuring the genuine love relationships that also occurred between Italian women and non-white Allied soldiers.

This interlude briefly recounts the story of other “brown babies” who were born from the encounter between Italian women and colonial subjects considered "dangerous" and sent by Mussolini to confino (internment) in an isolated village in Calabria at the end of the 1930s. One of them left the village for Ethiopia in 1961 to access the inheritance left to him by his wealthy father and became the protagonist of a sensational story reported on both sides of the Atlantic.