Transforming Cefalù in Mogadishu: The Arabo-Normanna Cathedral of Italian Somalia and the Façade of “Peaceful Conquest”

Abstract

The Cathedral of Mogadishu now stands in ruins as a shell of Italian colonial ambition in Somalia. Built largely from 1925 to 1928, its peculiar design presents an unusual case study among the neomedieval monuments constructed in the Italian colonies. The building is an adaptation of the twelfth-century Cathedral of Cefalù in Sicily, which the Norman King Roger II erected as he established his rule over the island and its significant Muslim population. This article reveals for the first time the history of the neomedieval cathedral’s construction, using archival sources to elucidate the colonizers’ unique decision to symbolically, and forcibly, subsume modern Somalia into medieval Sicilian history. Directed by the Istituto Missioni Consolata under the Fascist governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi, the cathedral was built upon a tangled web of contradictory ideologies, histories, and visual references to conceal the violence of the regime under the pretense of “peaceful conquest.”