This study draws upon theories of the emotions as complex constructions that are culturally, socially, and historically contingent, in order to posit a critical frame for examining the meanings attached to love in discourses of Italian colonial emotions. Focusing on the colonial novel Fortuna sotto vento, one of several fictional works penned by the critically acclaimed author Pina Ballario, the essay scrutinizes the ideals, values, pleasures, and prohibitions entwined with diverse representations of love and speculates about how such depictions encode ideal Italian colonial identity, along with differences of gender, race, sexuality, and space. While so doing, the discussion endeavors to situate the designs and functions of love crafted in Ballario's colonial fiction in relation to notions of love and colonial conquest in Fascist writings of the 1930s and in “postcolonial” discourse of the 1990s.
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