Browse Exhibits (1 total)

In 1911, the Italian liberal government launched the colonial invasion of what is now known as Libya. Italy’s response to local resistance was largely unprecedented in the history of European colonialism. Thousands of people, including children, women, and elderly people were deported to the metropole. Throughout the 1910s, deportees were taken from Libya to over 20 Italian locations. The majority were sent to southern Italian islands where a penal colony system was already in place, namely Ustica, the Tremiti archipelago, Ponza, and Favignana. Hundreds of deportees were also sent to the military prison of Gaeta.

This online exhibition visually explores the extent to which the past presence of Libyan deportees is visible and memorialized on these sites. It brings together locations where Libyan deportees were held between 1911 and the early 1930s, highlighting a range of local sites. Some, marked with plaques or monuments, explicitly commemorate the experiences of the deportees, while others, like former detention sites, bear no visible trace of this history

The online exhibition also engages with the voices of some local community members tied to former sites of confinement, capturing their reflections on the visibility and invisibility of the past Libyan presence on the islands and the former military prison in Gaeta (Section: Local Communities and the Memory of Colonial Deportations). 

The exhibition encourages viewers to reflect on the role of physical memory sites in eliciting reflections on colonial histories and their legacy. By treating local memory work on colonial deportations as ‘isolated memories’, both literally and metaphorically, the exhibition wishes to throw light on the persistent displacement (and silencing) of colonial memories at the national and European levels.

The exhibition is organised into three main sections:

• Remembering (and) Forgetting Colonial Deportations from Libya to Italy (with a dedicated section for each site: Ustica, Tremiti archipelago, Gaeta, Ponza, and Favignana)

• Local Memories

• Local Communities and the Memory of Colonial Deportations

The pictures are geographically and thematically labelled. The main themes are: monuments and plaques, detention, life on the island and local memories.  

It is recommended that you click on each picture to fully view them.

The section ‘The Exhibition’ provides a more extensive insight into the exhibition’s rationale.