Haiti’s path to sovereignty, however, was far from straightforward. After independence in 1804, the country divided into two states: a republic in the South and a kingdom in the North, governed by the former revolutionary general Henry Christophe, born into slavery on the island of Granada. After the fall of the kingdom, his wife, Queen Marie-Louise, chose Italy as her place of exile, and settled there in the same years that Beltrami was travelling through Haiti.

The year 2026 marks the bicentenary of Beltrami’s journey to Haiti. It offers an opportunity to bring these intertwined histories back into focus and to reconsider Haiti’s central place in the making of the modern world.

The Italy that was still taking shape would soon confront questions already familiar to Haiti: how to forge a people, claim sovereignty, and assert a place within a global order in which geopolitics and ideas of race were deeply intertwined, and in which migration could be both voluntary and forced.
Imagining a Nation brings history and art together to tell the story of Haiti, the first postcolonial nation founded by people of African descent, and of the ideas, images, and imaginaries that travelled far beyond its borders.