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and is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.The persecution and internment of Gypsies in Fascist Italy is still a topic that has not been addressed either at a historical level or at a political one. During ethnographic research in an Italian Sinti community I collected the first testimonies on their internment, which took place between 1940 and 1943 in a village in the Apennines. To date, their testimonies have not been reported in any historical work, nor have they aroused any interest in cultural institutions responsible for safeguarding the memory of the crimes and persecutions during the fascist regime. In order to support the stories remembered by the Sinti, I used archival material connecting the historiography on civil internment during fascism with the gypsies' parallel internment. This interweaving of ethnographic and archival research has allowed me to shed light on the incongruities and the shortcomings in the documentation on the persecution of the Gypsies in Italy during fascist regime.

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The Sinti are an array of gypsies groups settled in Italy since centuries and nowadays living in the northern regions of the country. The complex connections between self-narrative and gypsy identity and their relations to non-gypsy dominant society are inquired here, through an anthropological and textual approach. Furthermore, the uses of writing in sinti groups (who are only partially literate) with respect to the non-gypsy society is highlighted by the ways of « making » their autobiographical texts. Actually, given their incomplete knowledge about the publishing world and the writing, the publishing of Sintis' books (i.e. autobiographies) always engage and depend on non-gypsy (gadje) editors. Finally, the analysis of the role played by non-gypsy editors and the ethnographic approach permit to underline the peculiar modalities with which the gypsies authors communicate with both peers of their community and non-gypsies readers. « Nous avons dit que le texte postule la coopération du lecteur comme condition d'actualisation. Nous pouvons l'exprimer mieux en disant qu'un texte est un produit dont le sort interprétatif doit faire partie du mécanisme générateur : produire un texte signifie mettre en oeuvre une stratégie dans laquelle se retrouvent les prévisions des manoeuvres des autres-comme, d'autre part, n'importe quelle stratégie (Eco 1979: 54).»

AbstractThe archival documents I work with concern Sinti (“Gypsy”) families belonging to the Austrian Empire, stopped by the Italian authorities between 1908 and 1912. By following Anna Laura Stoler's proposition, I read the police records through an ethnographic lens, connecting the anti-Gypsy policy of both states with the strategies adopted by the Sinti families to inhabit and/or cross borders. Thus, the border becomes the space where the sovereignty of the state came into play and where the categories of “citizen” and “foreigner” become explicit through the daily controls on those who attempt to cross. Intertwining research in the archives with anthropological literature and fieldwork, this article presents a historical ethnography of those Sinti families who experienced the borders as “Gypsies,” a category that calls for critical analysis because it goes beyond the foreigner/citizen dichotomy.