Last month, an anti-racist group in Milan asked for the removal of a statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli, pointing out that he bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a “temporary wife”—that is, a sex slave—when he was a young colonial soldier in the 1930s. It was no secret. Montanelli, a celebrity conservative journalist who also enjoyed a following among the left, repeatedly bragged about the episode until his death in 2001. He resorted to overtly racist tropes, describing the girl, whose name was either Fatima or Destà, as “a docile tiny pet” and stressing that he was repulsed by her smell. He dismissed the charges of pedophilia, claiming that African girls are different from Europeans: “At 14, they’re women; at 20 they are old.”