4 - The Archipelago

Summary

I have been on Lipari for six months. … I am already sick of it, horribly sick of life in a chicken coop, of this false appearance of liberty: better prison, perhaps. In a prison cell, the impossibility of escape is evident and the suffering more clear. The confino is a cell without walls, all sky and sea: the patrols of militiamen serve as the walls. Walls of flesh and bones, not brick and mortar. The desire to climb over them becomes an obsession. …

Carlo Rosselli, 1928

[Confino di polizia] is the masterpiece of the regime: the danger of being sent off hangs over everyone. For Fascism, this yields much more than just the punishments inflicted. The punishment is for the few; the threat is for everyone.

Emilio Lussu

The network of islands and villages that constituted the Fascist archipelago represented a microcosm of the regime's deceptively violent strategies of rule. Fascist propaganda regularly characterized island confinement as a “villeggiatura” (seaside holiday), drawing particular attention to the colonies on Lipari and Ponza, where ex-parliamentary deputies lived comfortably in private accommodations. The reality of the archipelago was starkly different. On other islands, and even within the colonies on Lipari and Ponza, many detainees lived in squalid, vermin-infested barracks, without running water or electricity. The “common” colonies in particular were overcrowded, disease-ridden, awful places.