Before becoming a national park in 2002, the island of about 50 km2 , which lies at the north-western end of the Gulf of Asinara (Sardinia), experienced all the forms of confinement that its relative isolation allowed, some 500 metres from the islet of Piana, separated from the peninsula of Stintino by approximately another half kilometre. This began in 1885, with the creation of an agricultural penal colony in Cala d’Oliva, on the heights of the island’s village, and a quarantine lazaretto a little further south, in Cala Reale. The difficulties raised by the bill presented to the Chamber of Deputies by the President of the Council and Minister of the Interior, Agostino Depretis: the fate of the island’s fishermen and shepherds and the lack of water, were solved by building a cistern and expropriating the inhabitants. The workforce was made up of the penal population brought in convoys of 10 to 40 convicts who were harnessed to the construction of the lazaretto until 1897 (it closed in 1939) and a new prison which was soon built in Fornelli in the south of the island, where the territory was divided under the dual jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Navy and the Interior.
Between December 1915 and March 1916, with the disembarkation of 24,000 prisoners of war from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the “health station”, organised for a maximum of 1,500 patients, was unable to cope with the cholera that broke out on board the maritime convoys at the same time as in the Albanian transit camp of Valona. The epidemic kills 7 to 8,000 prisoners spread over several points of the island according to the camps that are hastily set up (forcing the penal colony to concentrate in the north of the island): in Fornelli, Stretti, Campu Perdu, Tumbarino. The location of this last camp was used to supply the colony with wood, while in Santa Maria, Campu Perdu and Stretti, farming and breeding (and fishing) were practiced: 230 hectares (of olive trees, vines, cereals and other food crops) were cultivated at the beginning of the XXe century not only by the colony – a life-size prison inspired by the one set up in the Tuscan archipelago on the island of Pianosa, which was constituted as a penal colony in 1858, and then on the island of Gorgon in 1871 – but also thanks to the arrival of 10,000 other prisoners of war after the cholera epidemic.
In 1937, the eldest daughter of the Negus Haile Selassie, captured by the Italian colonial authorities, was interned on the Asinara, as were several hundred Ethiopian personalities during the second war of occupation of that country. The Mussolini confino politico thus revived the relegatio ad insulam of Roman antiquity by interning opponents, as a police and security measure, on islands with a history of exile, in particular Ponza and Ventotene in the Pontine Islands archipelago off the coast of Lazio, or even Ustica, Favignana, Lampedusa, Lipari, Pantelleria and Tremiti. In the 1970s, the turning point in Asinara was the transfer of some of the most important leaders of the Red Brigades to the Fornelli prison, in the building, reconditioned for the occasion, where the penal agricultural colony had initially been the place of detention for about fifty convicts, whose number increased tenfold: Now (in the mid-1970s), there are more than a hundred in the Fornelli prison, twice that number in the casa di lavoro (“open” regime during the day), the remaining small hundred or so in ten sections (diramazioni), including Casa Bianche, the northernmost one (where sconsegnati benefiting from semi-liberty are housed), which is added to the existing “annexes” (for sexual crimes, among others, in Tumbarino, and for international drug trafficking in Santa Maria).
Following a series of causes – the controversial authority of the new prison director (tried and then convicted for corruption), the right to visit and the very severe conditions of detention, foiled escape plans, rebellions that were more or less put down, pressure from the local population and public opinion, the taking hostage by the Red Brigades, still at large, of a judge in Rome to obtain the closure of the Fornelli district – the activists were transferred again at the end of 1980; This did not prevent the Asinara from continuing to be the “high security” prison of organised crime (Sicilian Mafia and Camorra) until its closure in 1997. At the beginning of the 1980s, Cala d’Oliva, which remained a “central” prison, became the “fortified” prison of Toto Riina.
For more than a hundred years (almost forty of which were spent demanding the conversion of the island into a natural park), what makes Asinara special, chosen almost by accident alongside the seven other agricultural colonies in Sardinia, is not only the combination of its sanitary and penitentiary functions but also, paradoxically (given its remoteness), its involuntary immersion in a history (world war and colonisation, fascism, terrorism and banditry…) which exposed him to all the regimes, alternately civil and military, in terms of discipline (workshops and agricultural colony) and surveillance and detention (semi-liberty, reclusion, relegation, quarantine, internment in “concentration” camps for prisoners of war). And this very exposure to history also explains its recent metamorphosis… A complete reversal of paradigm indeed: visiting the Asinara on a “little train” that swirls to the rhythm of the calas, the tourist is asked to keep a good distance from the donkeys, which are left entirely free to cross the roadway which cuts the whole island from south to north. Endemic to the island, the breed of albino donkeys is considered “vulnerable” because of what makes it a “protected species” while at the same time contributing to this vulnerability: inbreeding. So much so that, not content with transforming the donkey from a domestic animal into a new island emblem stamped “nature” (at the cost of a false etymological connection[1] ), we have switched into an axiology of “Animal Reserve” and tourist attraction where the health station has given way to the veterinary station and the prison space to the environmental Eden.
[1] None of the Latin names of the island (Herculis Insula, Sinuaria or even Aenaria) allow the recognition of asinus (i.e. donkey).
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GUTIERREZ M., MATTONE A., VAISECCHI F. (1998), L’isola dell’Asinara: l’ambiente, la storia, il parco, Poliedro, Nuoro.
GORGOLINI L. (2011), I dannati dell’Asinara, l’odissea dei prigioneri austro-ungarici nella Prima guerra mondiale, Utet editore, Milano.