The internment of Italian Sinti in the province of Modena during fascism: From ethnographic to archival research

The persecution and internment of Gypsies in Fascist Italy is still a topic that has not been addressed either at a historical level or at a political one. During ethnographic research in an Italian Sinti community I collected the first testimonies on their internment, which took place between 1940 and 1943 in a village in the Apennines. To date, their testimonies have not been reported in any historical work, nor have they aroused any interest in cultural institutions responsible for safeguarding the memory of the crimes and persecutions during the fascist regime. In order to support the stories remembered by the Sinti, I used archival material connecting the historiography on civil internment during fascism with the gypsies’ parallel internment. This interweaving of ethnographic and archival research has allowed me to shed light on the incongruities and the shortcomings in the documentation on the persecution of the Gypsies in Italy during fascist regime.