Fragile Memories: A Brief Historical Overview of Italian Conservation Laws on Fascist Concentration Camps

Contemporary critical reflection has been looking for some time and from different angles at the close link between physical places and remembrance, fully aware that the link between places and events has always been stronger than any built memorial. It is generally accepted that places themselves have the ability to ‘preserve the memory of the event they bear witness to’, even if the relation between the event, the physical place and the act of remembering isn’t always straightforward and immediately understandable. The historical heritage of a particular site is often the result of cultural processes and it is sometimes impossible to separate policies aimed at helping people remember from politics. Hence, the alternation between oblivion and rediscovery, and the different ways of looking at the same site have led to the stories these places bear witness to being incomplete and biased. It is not surprising, though, that the sites are still able to preserve memories, even when these have been temporarily forgotten. After the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938, in Italy more than 250 imprisonment and transit camps for Jews, stateless persons and antifascists were established, which were managed by the fascist government and the German occupation troops. Many of these structures were built in the open countryside or arranged in abandoned buildings. After the war some of these objects were abandoned or reused as temporary prisons, others became little self-sufficient “towns” for hosting Istrian refugees like Fossoli, known as “Villaggio San Marco”. The shame regarding one of the darkest pages in our history condemned these places, vestiges of World War II, to oblivion and sometime to disappearance and still today they are without any specific law of protection. The essay intends to take stock of what remains of these "towns", harbinger of horror, reflecting on their lack of protection, but also to describe the strategies implemented only recently for the mise en valeur of some of these places.