ABSTRACT
The Italian government started to implement the technical and normative directives finalized to regulate the internment of civilians in the mid-1920s, coordinating them closely with other actions undertaken to prepare Italy’s possible entry into war. A subsequent memorandum released by the Ministry of the Interior only two days before Italy entered into war provided peripheral authorities with the “rules” to run “concentration camps and internment localities.” In big cities, where the majority of foreigners resided, law enforcement units performed thorough searches, often without warrants to notify those it arrested. The stages of arrest and detention followed a rehearsed routine leading to the transfer of people to confinement; as a result, they were thoroughly familiar to those who had been sent to confinement previously. The reference models for fascist camps are therefore recognizable in the same concentrationary Italian praxis that by the 1940s already had its own, well-consolidated tradition.
