‘A place in the sun’, a great adventure, almost a new Eldorado. This is how Italian propaganda – first under the liberal state and later under the fascist regime – portrayed the colonial dream for many years. The reality, however, from the defeats at Dogali and Adwa to the gruelling counter-guerrilla operations in Libya and the Horn of Africa, was far more bitter. In this essay, the result of two decades of meticulous archival and field research, Federica Saini Fasanotti reconstructs the most significant military operations that led to the conquest of Libya and Ethiopia and their subsequent loss. Through the stories of the men who, with their dreams, weaknesses and, at times, acts of heroism, took part in those wars, Saini Fasanotti also confronts head-on even the most tragic moments of that experience, which are all too often repressed: from the suffering inflicted on civilian populations to the use of gas, demonstrating how the Italian colonial war oscillated between ‘maintaining order’ and ‘establishing order’, without ever managing to determine which objective was truly the priority. Coercion in the overseas territories, lacking a coherent plan, thus generated only temporary control, without achieving genuine pacification.