Abstract: Recent trends in Italian colonial and postcolonial studies are pointing out the significance of a vast array of visual practices as means to mould and spread colonial discourses and knowledge in liberal, fascist and even post-war Italy (Bertella Farnetti, Mignemi, Triulzi, 2013, Tomasella 2017, Carli 2020, Baioni 2020, Mancosu 2020). Although excellent works have broached thorough analysis on discrete case-studies, a thorough reflection on the quantity of colonial collections, large or small, scattered over the Italian peninsula, is still missing. Of the almost one hundred collections housed, on display or not, in Italian museums, only a few are recognised by curators, the public and even researchers themselves as ‘colonial’. I am referring not only to anthropological-ethnographic collections, but also to botanical, mineralogical and zoological ones, which are often forgotten in the current debate about decolonialization of Cultural Heritage but are nevertheless part of the formation of a colonial imaginary, consciousness and environment. This paper aims to identify and briefly describe the colonial collections in Italian university museums, focusing then on some of the most significant collections and museums. From the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence to the Museums of Zoology in Modena and Bologna, and the Museum and Botanical Garden of the University of Genoa, I will briefly reconstruct the history of the exhibitions of these collections, outlining their contemporary dimension and current state, and the projects (or lack of projects) for the future. It will be pointed out, for example, how many of these displays still have problematic inscriptions (or concepts and place names created by the colonisers) in the captions but attempts to present some displays as “metamuseums” and to change their perception by inserting explanatory panels will also be highlighted. Finally, some recent cases of requests for restitution to university museums (the case of the Zemi form the Anthropological-ethnographic university museum in Turin, for example) and the responses to them will be briefly considered.