Fiori di campo. Storie di internamento femminile nell’Italia fascista (1940-1943)

This research aims to illustrate the civil internment carried out by the Fascist regime during World War II and, in particular, women internment through the specific analysis of the seven Italian female camps run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs between 1940 and 1943: Treia, Petriolo and Pollenza (in Macerata province, in the Marche region), Lanciano (in Chieti province, in the Abruzzo region), Vinchiaturo and Casacalenda (in Campobasso province, in the Molise region), and Solofra (in Avellino province, in the Campania region). The project purpose is to retrace the history of these seven facilities and to create a list of all the inmates in order to newly investigate the Fascist civil internment from an innovative point of view by analysing events and characters, mostly, never studied before. This work is divided into four parts. The first one deals with the historical background which explains the delay in the development of the interment historiography compared to other national ones. This section first retraces the Fascist public memory and its removal, then analyses other reasons of its delay: the priority of the Italian Resistance movement, the overlapping of internment with forced confinement, sources fragmentation and finally the relation with Shoah historiography. The second part chronologically rebuild the history of Fascist civil interment establishing a relationship with the ongoing conflict and the international situation and retracing the law evolution from late 1920’s till the Armistice and the end of the War. The chapter aims to examine the complexity of the phenomenon in its entirety considering foreign and internal policy issues, Public Security, emergency state, war law and racial policy. The third chapter, which is the core section of the project, rebuilds the stories of the seven female camps through the description of the facilities, their internal operating activities, the management, the inmates lives, functions and roles of police commissioners, area inspectors, directors, guards and of anyone dealing with the camps and the inmates (such as service staff, suppliers, merchants, citizenry,…). The research focuses on the internal social dynamics and its effects on social and economic microcosms of the local communities, on the relationship with the authorities, on the inmates legal protection by international organisations, on the racial and social relationships among the inmates themselves, and their interaction with staff and local population. In this section, the subject is analysed first on a geographical level, starting from on a provincial base and then focussing on the single facilities of each province; and also on a chronological level, beginning with the research works dealing with the recognition internment facilities in each province and then retracing the history of the facilities from the camps opening to their closure (in the period between 1940 and 1943, and going on to the first months of 1944 as far as the northernmost camps are concerned, where the interment actives continued according to the new directions of the Italian Social Republic). Each provincial context is introduced by a paragraph that briefly retraces the presence in the province of internment camps and other facilities, from the declaration of war to the provinces liberation by the allies and then until the closure of the facilities and the last internment procedures of a sigle area (or at least until there are documents available). In this part, the work focuses on the role and the activity of the local officials, such as the area inspector, the prefect, the police commissioner and the prefecture staff - in charge of inmates mail censorship and the monitoring of their life conditions. The last chapter includes an analytic list of the seven facilities inmates with an analysis of the camps population based on nationalities, civil status, profession, race and political faith. 699 inmates have been identified and listed using the attendance registers, the camp management documentation and inmates personal files. Besides identity records, nationality and race, further circumstances have been investigated in order to explain the reasons of the internment.