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This paper analyses changes in time of educational tools meant to make young Italian students aware of their in-group colonial history, proposing that this kind of study can give relevant insights on how broader socio-psychological processes are gradually facing this difficult past. Immediately after the swift collapse of the so-called Italian colonial “Empire”, a social denial (Cohen, 2001) silenced for decades the severe crimes committed during the colonial invasions. Moreover, an enduring social myth, depicting Italians as good fellows, incapable of cruelty (“Italiani brava gente”, Del Boca, 2005), sometimes also surfacing today, heavily biased the Italian societal discourse about the colonial past. Finally, even when history scholars proved beyond doubt the occurrence of these past crimes (Labanca, 2002), a self-censorship (Bar-Tal, 2017) advised not to touch on this matter, presenting it as inconvenient or out of date. The gradual unfolding of these processes consolidated a “social amnesia” that still persists (Leone & Sarrica, 2017). In this societal frame, in the first decade of 2000s narratives on colonial crimes were finally included among manuals’ contents, although briefly and somewhat reluctantly (Leone & Mastrovito, 2010; Cajani, 2013). While other popular narratives on this period (provided by literature, movies, games, etc.) still lacked, school became the main place where young generations were made aware of their in-group past history, even in its cumbersome traits, contributing to build, share, or challenge a colonial imaginary (Gabrielli, 2015). In the context of formal education, history textbooks play the central role of highly legitimated narrative artifacts (Sakki, 2025). Today, in Italian contemporary intercultural context, history textbooks provide to the new classrooms narratives addressing both to colonizers and colonized descendants. In our study we decided to focus on the use of images that only recently received a keener attention, due to their influence on cognitive and emotional reactions of readers (Gabowitsch & Topolska, 2023). We longitudinally analyzed the images siding the narrative on Fascist colonial episodes, reviewing 21 Italian history textbooks, from 1950 to present days. Interestingly, results showed that the use of images varied in three time periods, and allowed to distinguish qualitatively different kinds of images gradually emerging. In a first period, ranging from 1950 to 1980, following an initial absence of images, geo-historical maps began to appear, and were consistently present from this period on. In a second time period, starting from the 1990s, documentary photographs - often depicting the shocking colonial violence committed by Italians - and magazine covers or newspaper front pages sided the maps. Finally, in a third time period, from the 2000s onwards, explicit Fascist propaganda images were introduced in textbooks to complement the other kinds of images. Afterwards, in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews addressing young students, both Italian and Italian of second generation (N=20) were conducted, exploring their emotional and cognitive reactions when presented with these different kinds of images.