Tripoli launches break ties with colonial era landmarks

Tripoli has opened a debate over how Libya remembers colonial rule by asking the public to help rename two prominent landmarks still carrying the language and symbolism of the Italian era, as reported by The Libya Observer and agencies on March 21st.

The Municipality of Tripoli Center stated that it had launched a public opinion poll on renaming Galleria de Bono and Galleria Mariotti, inviting citizens and residents to propose alternatives that better reflect Tripoli’s historical and cultural identity and its Libyan heritage.

Officials said public input would form part of the Municipal Council’s decision-making process, with submitted views and proposals to be reviewed through formal procedures.

The significance of the initiative lies not only in removing colonial-era names, but in doing so through a civic process that presents symbolic change as something rooted in public will rather than municipal decree alone.

Galleria de Bono, the landmark in Algeria Square, was constructed in 1931 during the Italian colonial period and was named after Emilio De Bono, the Italian general and early Fascist figure who later served as governor of Tripolitania.

Italian rule in Libya began with the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and evolved into a longer settler-colonial project under Fascism, marked by repression, forced control and the remaking of urban space in the service of imperial power.

In that context, the question is not merely whether a building should keep an old name. It is whether a postcolonial capital should continue to normalise the honorific traces of the regime that occupied it.

Galleria Mariotti, built in the 1950s and still embedded in Tripoli’s commercial and architectural memory, raises a slightly different issue. Here, the task is less about erasing heritage than reinterpreting it.

The municipality’s vote suggests that Tripoli is trying to distinguish between preserving the city’s built fabric and preserving the political vocabulary attached to it.

That is why the renaming effort carries weight beyond local administration, as it signals an attempt to bring the capital’s everyday landscape closer into alignment with Libyan historical consciousness, without pretending that the colonial past can simply be changed.

The Libya Observer plus agencies, Maghrebi.org