This paper examines the lopsided process of restitution of looted cultural property in Italy from the end of the Second World War to the publishing of the Report on the spoliation of Jewish citizens by the Anselmi Commission in 2001. As the paper demonstrates, postwar Italy was exceptional in turning the restitution of national collections into a moment of cathartic rebirth while whitewashing - or all together forgetting - fascism’s persecution of its Jewish and colonial subjects. It was only with the end of the Cold War that this collective amnesia, or rather this voluntary suppression of fascist expropriations and their only partial restitution, would finally start showing the first cracks in its façade, but this phase of awakening was to be remarkably brief.
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