by Alice Parrinello
Piazza dei Cinquecento, in Rome, is dedicated to five hundred Italian colonising soldiers who died in nineteenth-century Eritrea. Contributing to the national narrative, the piazza constructs them as mere heroic victims. Simultaneously, the piazza is central in two novels that challenge normative discourses on Italianness: L’aurora delle trans cattive (2018) by Porpora Marcasciano and La linea del colore (2020) by Igiaba Scego. Marcasciano’s memoir contributes to the queer Italian archive by painting a picture of the 1980s through her experiences as a trans woman. Starting from her own arrest in the piazza, Marcasciano challenges the place’s history, describing it as a “luna park” of cruising. Similarly, Scego unearths the often-forgotten colonial Italian past connected to the piazza and brings it to the forefront. The piazza is the introduction to a narrative that intermixes the life of a black woman painter in the nineteenth century and a black writer in the twenty-first century. The paper focuses on Piazza dei Cinquecento as a de-normativised lieu de mémoire—a site not of national memory, but of memory of queer trauma and racialisation, not a monument to national unity, but a space for (post)national intersectionality.