ABSTRACT During the 1970s, the Italian prison system was shaken by a wave of protests that undermined the established ‘order and discipline’ of penal institutions. Prisoners’ mobilizations progressively weakened traditional repressive tools such as solitary confinement, disciplinary transfers, and harsh-regime facilities. Faced with difficulties in controlling penal institutions, the prison administration developed an innovative response: the Camosci circuit, a maximum-security circuit that became operative in May 1977. It represented the practical implementation of the logic of differentiation applied to the penitentiary space, aiming to isolate dangerous inmates and disrupt their social and political ties. Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources, this article reconstructs the origins, development, and functioning of the circuit. It highlights spatiality as a key component of the new repressive strategies, showing how the circuit reshaped disciplinary mechanisms and revealed the flexibility of the Italian penal system in its transition from emergency responses to more structured forms of control.

ABSTRACT This introduction presents the special issue as an invitation to reconceptualize the historiography of punishment. It starts with the perception of a double shortcoming in the field. On the one hand, I observe the growing mismatch between the theoretical frameworks that we have received from the 1970s and the findings of the burgeoning literature that has been published on the topic during the last decades. On the other hand, I acknowledge that the new scholarship has most often confined itself to the empirical realm and has fallen short of providing comprehensive alternative conceptualizations. In this context, this special issue proposes some concepts as a starting point for a new analytical lexicon for our field: punitive sources, targets, legitimations, settings, institutions, regimes, circuits, circulations and configurations. The final section presents the six essays included in this special issue, highlights their contribution to the larger theoretical debate, and considers the relevance of a focus on “Italy” in this endeavour.

ABSTRACT Prison guards, generally hidden behind penitentiary walls, are largely absent from the growing transnational historiography about the variety and evolution of modern punitive regimes. Yet they were important actors in implementing legal policy from above and shaping the quality of life for inmates under their control. As a liminal group in the hierarchy of everyday prison life, they derived power from their administrative supervisors but often shared the lower-class backgrounds of their charges. Shortly after unification, the Italian state established a national Corps of Prison Guards as a sign of modernity and of its commitment to prison reform. Recruits were first brought to Rome for training and then employed throughout the network of male prisons. Yet two other groups performed similar duties: nuns in female prisons and teachers in reformatories for boys. Thus, pluralism – defined by gender and age – rather than uniformity characterized the relationship between guards and prisoners in liberal Italy.

ABSTRACT This article examines the social and economic dimensions of Italian political exile in mid-nineteenth-century London through the case of Luigi Pianciani and the Aid Society for Italian Exiles, active between 1850 and 1857. Drawing on an extensive corpus of unpublished correspondence preserved in the Italian Senate Archive in Rome, the study analyses more than fifty letters addressed to Pianciani by Italian exiles seeking assistance. Moving beyond the traditional portrayal of political exiles as conspirators, the article foregrounds everyday experiences of poverty, unemployment, illness, and mobility, situating Italian exile within the broader context of European political migration to Victorian Britain. By reconstructing the practices and limits of the Aid Society, the article contributes to recent historiography on exile as a social condition, revealing how political commitment, material deprivation, and transnational networks intersected in shaping the lived experience of nineteenth-century political displacement.

ABSTRACT This article offers an anthropological reading of Italy’s State Road 268 (SS 268), officially designated as a strategic evacuation route in the event of a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Based on long-term ethnographic research (2012–2025), the road emerges not as a space of safety but as a site of structural vulnerability, everyday risk, and political disillusionment. Through fieldwork, local testimonies, and media analysis, the SS 268 is interpreted as a “liminal infrastructure” that embodies the contradictions of Italy’s civil protection system: conceived to save lives, yet experienced as a trap. The essay introduces the notion of permanent temporariness to describe a condition in which emergency measures become normalized, suspending any durable solution. The road becomes a symbol of governance through neglect, a landscape where risk is distributed unequally across social and territorial lines. This case study contributes to broader debates within Italian studies and disaster anthropology by showing how infrastructures both reflect and reproduce systemic inequalities, failed planning, and everyday forms of abandonment.

ABSTRACT With its 1956 exit from the Movimento sociale italiano (M.S.I.), the neo-Fascist group Ordine Nuovo (O.N.) changed from party faction into political sect. During the 1960s, when the ruling Christian Democrats opened to the left and the M.S.I.’s insertion strategy stalled, O.N. evolved further by sponsoring movement-like growth on the terrain of civil society. Based on official reports from provincial prefectures and police stations, this study traces O.N.’s transformation – in parallel with its conspiratorial side – into a youth-based movement of the 1960s with zones of strength in Calabria, Campania, and Sicily. The findings provide grounds for a revaluation of O.N.’s organizational development as well as its relations to party politics, regional implantation, and moral framing.