A Social History of Italian Fascism by Patrizia Dogliani

Author:Patrizia Dogliani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031750830
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

Confined Lands: confine/confino

This section’s title plays on the ambivalence of the Italian term terre di confine. These words mean “borderlands,” with confine referring to the lands (terre) encircling or confining the nation. However, confine also means to confine in the sense of isolation or confinement. Hence, terre di confine is both border-lands and isolation-lands.

In December 1933 a group of banks together with the Arsa joint-stock company (owned by Jewish entrepreneurs from Trieste) created the Sardinian Mining Company, replacing the Bacu Abis Company, which had survived for years thanks to the support of fascist trade unions. In 1935, Arsa became the main shareholder in the Azienda carboni italiani (ACAI, the Italian coal company), a parastatal corporation with both private shareholdings and substantial contributions from the State. In 1937, following the discovery of new coal deposits in Istria (today part of Croatia) and Sardinia, the regime pursued an ambitious project of establishing mining villages and opening new wells as a way of breaking out of its international trade isolation and solving its chronic energy shortages. The first village was built near the town of Albona (today Labin) and took the name of Arsia, gathering peasants and fishermen from the Istria peninsula in search of more steady and remunerative work. The ACAI also identified a mining basin in the underdeveloped area of Sulcis, which was subsequently “aranized.” Sulcis also hosted a second village named Carbonia. Carbonia was initially conceived as a garden city that would accommodate a maximum of 12,000 inhabitants in two-story cottages that would accommodate four families each, recalling a typology of “typical Italic tradition.” Carbonia officially opened in December 1938 and soon eroded its planned green spaces as it grew to a population of 37,000 in 1942, three times the initial conception.

Soon the government diverted its attention from the less profitable Istria and sought to make Carbonia the capital of the Italian Ruhr. Instead, rapid growth and continuous labor turnover turned Carbonia into a port, where “the formless race of laborers and laborers” landed. When he arrived in the late 1930s from the continent, the mining engineer Valerio Tonini described this place as like a circle of Dante's hell. Yet Carbonia never became a melting pot of Italic populations. In 1938, out of 11,923 workers employed in construction and mining, as many as 9,581 were Sardinians, and of these more than eighty percent had been recruited in the province of Cagliari. The others came from all the Italian provinces, often individually. For many Sardinians, Carbonia offered an alternative solution to emigration to the continent, but they were mostly peasants and remained the poorest and least qualified workers. The managers and the skilled miners came from mainland Italy, and they brought with them a set of popular prejudices against the savage nature of the Sardinian population and environment.

A scientific and pseudoscientific literature produced at the turn of the century had helped to spread the stereotype of Sardinian barbarism, due to their natural isolation and genetic impoverishment. The forefathers of such literature

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