Italian Colonial Lasciapassare: A 1947 Travel Permit

The Passport of an Empire That No Longer Existed: Italy’s Colonial Lasciapassare for Africa

Rome, June 16, 1947: a government that no longer controls a single acre of its African empire is still, on that date, formally issuing the paperwork required to enter one of its former colonies. That contradiction sits at the heart of the document I’m looking at today, an eight page Lasciapassare issued to a woman in Rome, carrying visas stamped during the period of British administration in Eritrea (1941-1952).

What Exactly Was a Lasciapassare?

A Lasciapassare was Italy’s version of a travel permit, distinct from a full passport, used by Italian colonial authorities to control movement into and out of its African territories, most notably during Italy’s rule over Eritrea from 1890 to 1941. The word itself translates simply as “let pass,” and that’s a fair description of its function: a document whose entire purpose was consular and administrative gatekeeping rather than international travel in the modern sense. What makes this particular category so interesting to collectors is its afterlife. Italy lost its East African colonies in 1941, yet Lasciapassare documents kept circulating for years afterward, a paper trail from a colonial administration that had already been dissolved on the ground. The reasons are practical rather than mysterious: a transitional occupation period, Italian settlers and military personnel still resident in the territory, and consular offices that kept functioning under bilateral arrangements even after the political authority behind them had collapsed.

How Italy Ended Up Governing Eritrea

Italy’s foothold in Eritrea began not with conquest but with a real estate transaction, the 1869 purchase of the Red Sea port of Assab. From that toehold, Italy expanded steadily over the following two decades, helped along by a weakening Ottoman presence in the region and instability within Ethiopia. By 1885 Italian troops had taken Massawa, a second and far more strategically valuable Red Sea port, and four years later Italy signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Ethiopia’s Emperor Menelik II. That treaty, ambiguous in its Amharic and Italian versions on the crucial question of Ethiopian sovereignty, gave Italy the opening it wanted. Italian Eritrea was formally established as a colony in 1890.

Why Asmara Became “Little Rome”

Asmara earned that nickname because Italy poured colonial investment into making it a genuine showcase capital rather than a garrison town. Between 1890 and 1935, Italy built roads, railways, ports, and an entirely new colonial capital, replacing Massawa in that role by 1897. Italian architects filled Asmara with modernist buildings, schools, and new administrative structures, work substantial enough that much of it survives today as a UNESCO World Heritage site. None of this reflected colonial generosity, though. Eritreans lived under heavy taxation and severely restricted economic and political rights, while the benefits of “modernization” flowed overwhelmingly to Italian settlers.

What Fascist Rule Added to the Colonial System

Mussolini’s regime turned Eritrea from a colony into a military staging ground for a much larger imperial ambition. Italy used its Eritrean base to launch the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, and after a brief conquest, merged Ethiopia with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into what it called Italian East Africa. Conditions in Eritrea grew harsher during this period: forced conscription of Eritrean soldiers, known as askaris, forced labor, and formal racial segregation laws that hardened the social distance between Italian settlers and the Eritrean population. Ironically, this was also when Italian settlement and Asmara’s urban development peaked, meaning the city’s most photogenic modernist architecture and its most repressive administrative period were happening at the same time.

How Fast Italian Rule Actually Collapsed

Italian colonial rule in Eritrea ended in a single year, 1941, when British forces defeated Italian troops as part of the broader Allied campaign in East Africa. Nearly half a century of Italian administration ended almost overnight, and Eritrea passed under British military administration, the same administration whose entry stamps and travel controls appear in the visas on this 1947 document. That’s worth sitting with for a moment as a collector: the Lasciapassare in front of me was issued six years after Italy’s colonial authority in Eritrea had already ended, by a government still processing paperwork for a territory it no longer governed.

What Actually Survived From Italian Colonization

Asmara’s built environment is the most visible legacy, but Italian influence also worked its way into Eritrean cuisine and into Tigrinya, which absorbed a meaningful number of Italian loanwords. The infrastructure, urban planning conventions, and administrative habits Italy introduced also outlasted its political control by decades. None of that erases the coercive and unequal system that produced it, but it does explain why documents like this Lasciapassare still turn up: they’re physical remnants of an administrative machine that, in some residual consular form, kept running well past its formal expiration date.

Inside This 1947 Lasciapassare

This particular Lasciapassare is an eight page document issued in Rome on June 16, 1947, for a woman traveling to Asmara, Eritrea, and it carries British travel control and entry stamps from Massawa, evidence of the transitional authority governing the territory at that point. I’ve come across other formats in this same document family: a 1938 issue in brown, softcover; and a 1941 issue in blue running to twelve pages. The physical variation between issues, color, page count, binding, is itself a useful dating tool for anyone trying to place an undated example.

Four More Permits From Italy’s African Colonies

Beyond Eritrea, a reader named Antonio Basile generously shared images of four related colonial travel permits with me, and together they sketch a wider picture of how Italy managed movement across its African holdings. The first, issued in 1931 by the Government of Cyrenaica (the eastern region of present day Libya, governed from Benghazi), is a straightforward colonial entry permit.

The second, from 1940, is a family reunification permit, the document that allowed the wife and children of a man already resident in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, to join him there. It’s a reminder that these permits weren’t only about movement of officials and settlers; they governed something as ordinary as a family being allowed to live together under consular jurisdiction abroad.

The third is a permit for the Province of Ljubljana, present day Slovenia’s capital, which Italy occupied during the Second World War and administered as an Italian province from May 1941 to September 1943.

The last is the most poignant of the set: a Repatriation Card issued by the Italian Consulate General in Asmara for a woman born in Eritrea to Italian parents, authorizing her return to Italy under refugee status, departing from Massawa and arriving in Naples. The exact administrative framework under which repatriation cards like this were issued (which consular regulation, under what post-war bilateral arrangement) isn’t something I can pin down from the document alone, and I’d treat any specific claim about it as needing archival confirmation rather than assumption.

Given that Italy’s African colonial period lasted only about fifty years from start to finish, and that most of these documents were issued near its unraveling end, surviving examples like these are genuinely uncommon. My thanks again to Antonio Basile for sharing them.

Related article: German Colonial Empire and its Aftermaths

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
Featured by CNN, BBC, Newsweek... Awarded by the U.S. Dept. of State
Ask | Recognition | Books | Set as preferred source