In June 2009 Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi met in Rome to celebrate the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya. The treaty included a series of deals on fuel trade, colonial reparations and the Bilateral Agreements on migration which have led to severe human rights violations. As the event sparked several protests, it caused a media frenzy in Italy that brought to the fore the controversial relations between the two countries, as well as Italy’s troubled relation with its colonial past. Attempting to turn an archive of live news updates produced during the meeting into a script, this performative lecture dissects the memory of this event and the way it was reported. Through the layering and interplay of text, archival imagery, media footage and amateur documentation of the meeting available on YouTube, this ‘expanded script’ investigates how the news is produced and consumed today, while exposing the continuining (neo)colonial relations between Italy and Libya. Focusing on its main protagonists – Berlusconi and Gaddafi – it reflects on the way international politics are performed and how they are embodied in what Ruth Ben Ghiat defines as the tradition of ‘strongmen’ inaugurated by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.