Popular verse and the image of Italy and the Italians in twenty-century Albania

Being a key issue in the analysis of the relationship between the two countries, the question of the image of Italy and of the Italian people in Albania has often been mar-ginalized by socio-cultural studies and, rather, handed over to current affairs journali-sm. As a consequence, only the recent televised images of what can be considered “Italianness” have been put into prominence;; indeed, an Albanian “imagology” of Italy was formed after the Great War. It is this period of encounter/clash between these two countries that favoured the creation of the first images of the Italian world. These are the years of the “anti-imperialist war”, conducted by a population who were in great part illiterate and whose culture was rooted in oral traditions. For this reason, it is espe-cially in the literary traces of the folk songs that, with greater freshness, the Albanian considerations, prejudices or judgements can be traced. The compositions in question were largely collected and published during the communist period, when the regime it-self fostered a new interpretation of the Italians.