The subsequent opening of the Suez Canal made the Red Sea, for the first time since the Pharaohs, an extension of the Mediterranean, and greatly facilitated Italian travel to Ethiopia and adjacent lands. Italian travellers to the north of the country in this period included Luigi Pennazzi, Gustavo Bianchi, Pellegrino Matteucci, Pippo Vigoni, Cesare Nerazzini, Augusto Salimbeni, Carlo Piaggia, and Arturo Issel, while those to Shawa and the southern provinces included Orazio Antinori, Antonio Cecchi, Giovanni Chiarini, Leopoldo Traversi, Vicenzo Ragazzi, and other members of a mission of the Societa Geografica Italiana, which established itself at Let Marafeya, on the outskirts of the Shawan capital, Ankobar. Their research is described in considerable, and very valuable, detail in Cecchi's three volume Da Zeila alle frontiere del Caffa, as well as in many articles in the Bollettino della Societa Geografica Italiana, and other scientific and scholarly publications. Following the Flag Trade, it is often said, follows the flag. So, to some extent, does scholarship.
Scholarship can, however, also precede the flag.
Some Italian studies in fact preceded, and facilitated, Italian political expansion in Ethiopia, while others followed more or less directly therefrom. The coming of the Italians to northern Ethiopia, and the establishment of the Italian colony of Eritrea, gave a considerable fillip to Italian scholarship in the area. The now famous International Conferences of Ethiopian Studies were thus preceded by a series of Italian Colonial Congresses, one of them actually held at Asmara. Papers delivered included serious studies of the colonial people, and their history and culture, as well as various aspects of colonial policy and administration. The later fascist-inspired colonial congress of 1937 was on the other hand marred by doctrinaire racism.