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Abstract:

Between the 1860s and the 1960s, 16 penal colonies were founded in the rural territory of Italy. Their establishment was framed within two main goals of the newly born national state: the ultimate codification of a unified national penal law, and the domestication and modernization of remote – and often hostile - rural territories. Most of the penal colonies - in particular those established on the island of Sardinia - were conceived as transitory garrisons of national power. They were planned having in mind their future transformation from penal to civil settlements, a conversion to be accomplished once the agrarian reclaim of previously uncultivated land had been completed. Thus, penal colonies had to contribute to the birth and acceptance of a new rural order at the service of a modern agrarian economy. This assumed the complete abandonment by local farmers and shepherds of their secular habits and rights of use of land – called right of Ademprivium and based on the feudal condition of Dominium Divisum – in order to embrace the notion and rules of absolute ownership that the institution of the Cadaster had finally codified. Given these high ambitions, penal colonies developed as a specific settlement type, whose spatial principles registered both their contingent scope as carceral institutions, and the greater geopolitical project of reform - of people and space - in rural Italy.