This chapter examines the Italian translation of Langston Hughes’s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s against the grain of Hughes’s life experience in Italy in the summer of 1924, as evidenced in The Big Sea and the letters written during this time. It argues that the work of translation reflects Italy’s fascist racial thinking, which makes the poet’s Blackness either obscurely picturesque or altogether invisible. Hughes’s own reading of Italy, in turn, makes Blackness historically visible by uncovering the rhetorical illusion that plagued both the conventional view of African American poetic expression as folkloric and the conventional view Italy as idyllic.