The census of 1939 showed this population in Tripoli:
Town...... Italians....... Arabs........ Jews........ Total
Tripoli... 47,442......... 47,123...... 18,467......113,212
Italian Tripoli was at the center of Italian NorthAfrica in the "Greater Italy" during WW2 (borders in orange color).With Decree of 9 January 1939 the four provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi and Derna were aggregated to the Kingdom of Italy, becoming an integral part of the Italian metropolitan territory.
History
During the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 Tripoli was conquered by the Italian Kingdom. The Italian fleet appeared off Ottoman Tripoli in the evening of September 28, 1911: the city was quickly conquered by 1,500 Italian sailors, welcomed by the population (https://archive.org/details/tripoliitalianal00mart/page/36/mode/2upTripoli inhabitants welcomed the Italians; p. 36-40).
With the 1912 treaty signed in Ouchy, Italian sovereignty was acknowledged by the Ottomans, although the local Caliph was permitted to exercise religious authority. Italy officially granted autonomy after the war, but gradually occupied the region of Tripolitania. Originally administered as part of a single colony, Tripoli and its surrounding province were a separate colony from 26 June 1927 to 3 December 1934, when all Italian possessions in North Africa were merged into one colony called ''Libia''.
Since 1937 the governor Italo Balbo started a policy of immigration of Italians (mainly farmers) who were called the Ventimilli and some of them settled in the area of Italian Tripoli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_jA9rzM1MsVideo of Italian settlers arriving in the port of Tripoli).
So, by the end of 1937, the city had 108,240 inhabitants, including 39,096 Italians (according to The Statesman's Yearbook 1948. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 1040). At the start of WWII Italian Tripoli had 111,124 inhabitants of which the Italians were 41,304: 37% of the city's inhabitants. Additionally there were nearly 18,000 Jews in the Tripoli area. Indeed after the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911, the Jews made great strides in education and economic conditions: at that time, there were about 21,000 Jews in the country, the majority in Tripoli. In the late 1930s, Fascist anti-Jewish laws were gradually enforced, and Jews were subject to moderate repression: still, by late 1940 -due even to the partial rejection of those laws by governor Italo Balbo- the Jews accounted for a fifth of the population of Tripoli and maintained 44 synagogues.
In 1942 Tripoli -according to estimates of the Italian government (Istituto Agricolo Coloniale (Firenze); Ministero degli Esteri, 1946)- reached a temporary population of nearly 150,000 inhabitants, due to the arrival of many Italians from Benghazi and Cyrenaica who took refuge from the British army attacks during WWII. As a consequence Tripoli was in that year -for the first time since the Arab conquest in 643 AD- a city mostly Christian.
Architectural and Urbanistic improvement of Italian Tripoli
Tripoli underwent a huge architectural and urbanistic improvement under Italian rule (http://www.fedoa.unina.it/1881/1/Santoianni_Progettazione_Architettonica.pdf Tripoli section: p. 54-59). The first thing the Italians did was to create in the early 1920s a sewage system (that until then lacked) with water & electrical facilities to all the city and a modern hospital. Also was started the creation of the modern port.
Furthermore, in the western section of Tripoli was created an industrial area in the 1930s, around a huge tobacco factory (called "Manufattura Tabacchi di Tripoli"), with railway workshops, Fiat Motor works, various food processing plants, electrical engineering workshops, ironworks, water plants, agricultural machinery factories, breweries, distilleries, biscuit factories, tanneries, bakeries, lime, brick and cement works.
Governor Balbo used to say that "We Italians found in 1911 a big village of approximately 20,000 inhabitants called Tripoli and now we have in 1940 a modern capital nearly ten times bigger and one of the most developed and vibrant cities of Africa". (photos of Tripoli: http://www.paolocason.eu/Viaggio%20a%20Tripoli.htm ).
In the coast of the province was built in 1937-1938 a section of the Litoranea Balbia, a road that went from Tripoli and Tunisia's frontier to the border of Egypt. The car tag for the Italian province of Tripoli was "TL" ( Berionne, Michele. "Libia (1937-1943)" Italian car tags )
Furthermore the Italians - in order to promote Tripoli's economy - founded in 1927 the "Tripoli International Fair", which is considered to be the oldest Trade Fair in Africa (http://tripolifair.com/tripoli-international-fair/ Tripoli International Fair brief history). The so-called Fiera internazionale di Tripoli was one of the main international "Fairs" in the colonial world in the 1930s, and was internationally promoted together with the Tripoli Grand Prix as a showcase of Italian Libya(http://cronologia.leonardo.it/storia/a1937f.htm Filippo Giannini: Colonial Italy and Islam (in Italian).
Italian Tripoli's Via Generale De Bono in 1933
Indeed the Italians even created the "Tripoli Grand Prix", an international motor racing event first held in 1925 on a racing circuit outside Tripoli that lasted until 1940 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEtz-wzbs9YVideo of Tripoli Grand Prix).Tripoli during the Grand Prix was visited by the elite tourism of the world and had even some "fashion" shops (http://www.paolocason.it/Libia/fotolibia/wpe118.jpg Italian women walking near the Tripoli Castle).
The first airport in Libya, the "Mellaha Air Base" was built by the Italian Air Force in 1923 near the Tripoli racing circuit (actually is called "Mitiga International Airport"). The regular air services (with postal services) in Libya began in November 1928 with the first Rome-Syracuse-Tripoli air route, three times a week in winter, daily in summer, of the "Societa Anonima Navigazione Aerea (SANA)" airplanes. In the December of 1931 the "Società Nord Africa Aviazione (NAA)" inaugurated the Benghazi-Agedabia-Sirte-Tripoli line, which followed the coast line. With the absorption of the two companies from the ''Ala Littoria'' in 1935 the service continued on the same routes. From 4 April 1937 the Rome-Tunis line of Ala Littoria was extended to Tripoli; in 1938 the Air France opened a Marseilles-Tripoli line, then extended to Benghazi and Damascus. (http://www.academia.edu/2326842/Le_Poste_italiane_fuori_d_Italia ).
Tripoli had even a modern railway station with some small railway connections to nearby cities, when in August 1941 the Italians started to build a new 1,040 kilometres (646 miles) railway (with a 1,435 mm (56.5 in) gauge, like the one used in Egypt and Tunisia) between Tripoli and Benghazi. But the war -with the defeat of the Italian Army- stopped the construction the next year: only one hundred miles were created, but it was done also the project to connect this new railway with the borders of Tunisia & Egypt.
Tripoli was controlled by Italy until 1943 when the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were captured by Allied forces. The city fell to troops of the British Eighth Army on 23 January 1943 and the Italian colonists since then started to diminish (the following photo shows a family of farm colonists with British soldiers).
Tripoli was then governed by the British until independence in 1951. Under the terms of the 1947 peace treaty with the Allies, Italy relinquished all claims to Libya.
After WWII the era of international decolonization fostered a huge exodus of Italians from Tripoli (http://intranet.istoreto.it/esodo/parola.asp?id_parola=25 Italian exodus from Tripolitania), especially after Libya became independent in 1953. In 1948 there still were nearly 20,000 Italians in the city, but after 1970 the Italian population of the city (called Tripolini) almost disappeared when Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi ordered the expulsion of Italians (https://books.google.com/books?id=ax0EpcZqeMkC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=gheddafi+expulsion+of+italians&source=bl&ots=OYfkJX6Gd-&sig=7jgJ5We-toLe59m-eIyoYaBjjik&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PMEyVJnpE9C8ggSbzYGIBg#v=onepage&q=gheddafi%20expulsion%20of%20italians&f=false. Gaddafi expulsion of the Italians in 1970).
At present, the Libyan Italians are organized in the Associazione Italiani Rimpatriati dalla Libia (. http://www.airl.it Associazione Italiani Rimpatriati dalla Libia). The remaining "Tripolini" struggle to get their confiscated properties (http://www.airl.it/la-nostra-storia#eventistorici History of the Italian refugees from Gheddafi Libya) and even to maintain their Italian cemetery (https://www.corriere.it/esteri/16_aprile_10/cimitero-italiano-tripoli-sterpaglie-croci-divelte-devastazioni-70e3480c-ff61-11e5-a032-8e8dfe3b8a86.shtml Attacks on the Tripoli Italian Cemetery)
Infrastructures
Since the first years in Italian Tripoli were made many infrastructures by the Italians, even with the participation of the local arab "elite" (Journal of Libyan Studies 3, 1 (2002) p. 59-68: "Local Elites and Italian Town Planning Procedures in Early Colonial Tripoli (1911-1912)" by Denis Bocquet and Nora Lafi). The most important were the coastal road (called "Via Balbia" in honor of Italo Balbo after his death in 1940) between Tripoli and Benghazi and the railways Tripoli-Zuara, Tripoli-Garian and Tripoli-Tagiura.
The Cathedral of Tripoli (in the 1960s.
......to be continued.....
