CONFINO

Confino: translation

   This was one of several ways of dealing with those guilty of political or conspiratorial offenses during the Fascist regime, introduced in the Testo Unico di Pubblica Sicurezza (TUPS) in 1931. The Consolidated Text of the Public Security Law asserted that a person convicted of “conspiracy to commit a crime” or of acts compromising the security of the state might, as an alternative to incarceration, be ordered to leave his own city or town to take up residence in an assigned locality (residenza obbligata) where he would be free to move about, seek employment, and generally live a normal life so long as he reported in person to the local police at specified intervals. This practice is still in use today, particularly for those accused of associating with known mafiosi. Especially under Fascism, however, use was also made of “internal exile” or obligatory residence under police supervision in a place so remote and often so little populated as to be a virtual freerange prison. One was sent “to the border” or al confine, the very edges of the nation. The writer Carlo Levi described his experience of forced residence in a famous postwar novel, Cristo si e fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). Other prominent antifascists were sent into exile on such isolated islands as Lipari and Ventotene.