ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the sanitary motives of controlling Romani population before moving to the identification practices and the difficulties of applying the law of 1912 to the Romani population. It looks at the ways in which an increased surveillance was set up of the Romani camps and at the practices of relocation and evacuation that were undertaken. In Southern Italy, the Roma were accused of transmitting the illness and the increased suspicion this produced encouraged a recourse to confinement and other preventative measures. The history of Roma surveillance, is thus paradoxically one in which long-standing and many-layered inscriptions within urban territory were made by public and private interests into an essential motive justifying modern forms of administration and territorial purging in the interwar period. Long-distance identification and the logic of face-to-face surveillance were thus tightly linked in spite of the utopic horizon of omniscient power.
