Faccetta nera

The story

"Faccetta nera" ("Little black face") was written by the Roman poet Renato Micheli, with music by Mario Ruccione, in April 1935, as the Italian army prepared to invade Ethiopia. Fascist propaganda was then publishing stories of slavery in Ethiopia, and it presented the coming invasion not as a war of conquest but as a war of liberation to abolish slavery; these stories served in part to justify the conquest. Micheli wrote the song in Romanesco, the dialect of Rome, after reading them, meaning to enter it in the 1935 festival of Roman song. It is sung by a Blackshirt soldier to a young enslaved Ethiopian girl, and it praised Italy's colonial "civilising mission" by alluding to madamato, the concubinage of Italian men with Ethiopian women.

Nothing came of the festival, but once Ruccione had set it the singer Carlo Buti performed it at the Teatro Capranica in Rome, and at the Quattro Fontane theatre Anna Fougez's company staged it with a young Black woman in chains, freed by Fougez dressed as Italy and made to put on a black shirt. Taken into many revues, the song was hugely popular from the first days of the invasion, especially among the troops leaving for Ethiopia. The Italian article stresses that light songs of this kind hid the brutality of an occupation carried out with chemical weapons and with conduct contrary to the Geneva Convention. An early line recalling the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896, which the regime did not want brought to mind, was replaced by a more general one.

The regime itself was embarrassed by the song. During the occupation Ethiopian women lived with Italian men in the concubinage known as madamismo, but from May 1936 the government passed laws forbidding cohabitation and marriage between Italians and the colonised peoples of the empire, which culminated in the racial laws of 1938. Mussolini is said to have hated the song because it seemed to favour the mixing of races, and tried to have it banned; it had become too popular, so he settled for censoring it, and a verse was cut. The authorities also removed picture postcards of Ethiopian women from shop windows in Rome. With "Giovinezza", it remained the best-known song of the Fascist years.

The comic actor Gustavo Cacini later won a plagiarism case against Ruccione, as the refrain drew too closely on one of his own songs, and he received a share of the royalties; many publishers and composers claimed the song in its countless printed editions. Other writers answered it with songs called "Faccetta bianca" ("Little white face"), without its success. In 1938 a Florentine café owner, Enrico Mariotti, named a cocktail after it for Mussolini's visit. It has been heard in films as a sign of the period: The Best of Enemies (I due nemici, 1961, Guy Hamilton), Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Francesco Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, where Blackshirts prepare to leave for Ethiopia, Carlos Saura's ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990) and Checco Zalone's Tolo Tolo (2020), where the hero breaks into it in his "attacks of fascism".

What it says

A colonial marching song that presents the invasion of Ethiopia as the liberation of an enslaved Ethiopian girl; racist propaganda in a light, jaunty tone.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.