This paper explores Black diasporic subjectivity in Italy, the relationship between structural violence and individual suffering, and liminal—historical and contemporary—formations of Italian identity. Through the lens of ethnography, participant observation and structured and semi-structured interviews, this paper situates individual experience within the framework of racist Italian politics, policies, and social agreements through history. I do so by first, showing the relationship between the experiences of three subjects, Ami, Davide and Siid and their individual relationships to the historical Italian colonial trajectories that led to specific contemporary assumptions; second, by using two life histories—Luca and Amin’s— that reveal the complicated relationship between the personal, social, political and psychological in contemporary society; and, last, by offering theoretical approaches to “embed individual’s biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy” (Farmer 1996:272), including structural violence, subjectivity, and liminality. Anti-Black racism manifests in Italy through spatial and social marginalization, coloniality, lack of birth-right citizenship (ius solis) and reinforcement of blood citizenship (ius sanguinis), lack of a centralized reporting system of race-based discrimination, anti-Black/anti-migrant, pro-fascist, pro-ethnonationalism discourse, and race-based inter-personal and state violence. Based on my five subjects’ embodied experiences, thoughts, activism and work, I demonstrate that the ius sanguinis—race-based social and institutional discrimination—represents a structurally violent and institutionally racist strategy that operates in the Italian context, producing preventable suffering, (re)producing race-based exclusions, perpetuating postcolonial hegemonic power-dynamics, and jeopardizing solid identity formations.