You find strange the fact that an entire population doesn't match your stereotype based on the behaviour of a royal family? You understand that not only greed and desire to exploit minorities moved European (including Italian) explorers to foreign lands but also a genuine scientific interest? Whether this interest was funded and used for colonial purposes is another story, but there were plenty of men just spending and risking their life to learn obscure languages and cultures. By the way, this was the same interest that made anthropologists and ethnographers start studying rural populations from their own country. Ethnic museums in Italy are full of material from both Italian regions and overseas territories. Even if you wanted to label all of these people under the racist category (and you could do it to an extent), it shouldn't be surprising that people wanted to learn and understand different kinds of humans.