Paradigms of the Island A cartography of Asinara, from the Blank to the Park
Paolo Emilio Pisano
“Dal Mare non nascono né vite né ulivo, ma le isole, si, che danno loro radice.”1 Massimo Cacciari, l’Arcipelago
By tracing and unravelling the nature of the paradigms of the island and their shift in recent times through the conjuncture of entities of control, the search tries to expose the liminal areas which remain un-defined, with the belief that is in this conjuncture that a means of future use can be brought forth.
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Legend to Image: 01. Diramazione Centrale di Cala d’Oliva (Cala d’Oliva main branch) 02. Bunker di Cala d’Oliva (Cala d’Oliva bunker) 03. Cala d’Oliva cemetery 04. Kitchen garden 05. Houses and gardens of the officials 06. Cala d’Oliva harbour 07. Lavanderia (laundry) 08. Tower of Cala d’Oliva 09. Cala Murighessa or Cala della Lavanderia
The Village
It’s on the 7th of May, 1885 that a Surveying Commission from the Ministry of the Interior, after many deliberations, eventually identified the small village of Cala d’Oliva as the ideal site for the creation of a modern agrarian penal colony and the outpost for the internal colonisation of the island of Asinara. The choice of place was revealing, as it would expose the push for appropriation of the territory by the newly born state entity known as Regno d’Italia2. In fact, through the expropriation of the whole of the northern part of the island, where Cala d’Oliva is located, from its original inhabitants, the State would finally align an axis of control spanning from the area of influence of the village to the north, to the area of Fornelli to the South.3 Part of a territorial system of seasonal routes, strategically located to keep the whole gulf surrounding it at ease of reach and from the XVI century under the protection of two coastal control towers and their vaster surveillance system; Cala d’Oliva was occupied at intervals since primeval times. The village acquired its most stable character from 1768 on, when the failure of an attempt of colonisation by the Marseillese Velixandre brothers marked the quashing of any forms of external colonisation. The aftermath of the failed attempt saw return to the island of its most recently settled inhabitants, comprised of shepherds from the Nurra region and Ligurian fishermen from Camogli. The short civil history of the village was thus obliterated after a little more than one hundred years, replaced by the judicial system of the penal colony. This would impose a new organisational model centred around the institutional complex of the Diramazione Centrale and its ancillary edifices and stratify a new system of meaning and hierarchy over the existing structures of the village in an overtly ideological move, aligning with the new precepts of Colonizzazione Interna (Internal Colonisation).4 Thus, the village of Cala d’Oliva and its newly founded productive rural environment, suitably established by free labour force in the figure of the colony inmates, would eventually be returned to a community of private proprietors able to upkeep the thriving local economy. A scenography of traces dotted the way to the village through the only road leading to it from Trabuccato. These would have had an instrumental role in introducing the traveller, be him an inmate, official or visitor, to the adequate or proper expression (decorum) of the carcereal institution and, consequently, of what was expected of the inmate life and labour. An oliveto was thus planted on a steep hill rolling down towards the sea and lovingly tended by one of the colonists; anticipating a breath-taking view over Cala Murighessa, framed by eucalyptus trees on one side and a coastal control tower – the Cala d’Oliva one – on the other. Tellingly the cala had been also nicknamed of the inmates (dei detenuti), as this was where the inmates were brought for their weekly dip. On the other side of the road, a small orchard and hortus were annexed to the laundry of the village (lavanderia), where inmates also work. The beginning of the urban area was characterised by the remains of cultivated area pre-dating colonial times, also including orchard and hortus. These became part of the system of subsistence of the settlement promoted by the penal colony, extending from here up the hill. Flanking the sinuous road which climbs through the village houses up towards the Diramazione Centrale, it incorporated the working environment for inmates under different regimes of surveillance; from the orchard to the various vegetables and herbs plantations, the poultry and pigstry, onto the dairy and slaughterhouse.5 But this area was strictly separated from the village, contiguous but removed through a wall which claimed the virtue of silence and labour as instrumental to the achievement of the moral reformation of the colonists; until such moment, there was no allowance for mingling with civil society. The Diramazione Centrale towers monumentally above the village, reclaimed as the irradiating fulcrum of all traces of constructed memory. A paradigmatically empty seat of power. Its courtyard disposition, reminiscent of rural working lodges, hosts a heterogeneous collection of remnants of the carcereal past, composed as to selectively show aspects of inmate life to the throngs of tourist. In fact, the very prominence of it was undermined by the shift in the regime of surveillance, from an istituto di pena intermedio6 such as the agrarian penal colony, to a much stricter, coercive system, culminating with the creation of an ad hoc structure, known as the bunker, where notorious mafia boss Totò Riina was secluded in a regime of complete confinement. Here labour stopped having any reforming moral value, seclusion was paired with a most complete inactivity, and the formal ideal of the penal colony was collapsed into a much narrower environment, specifically designed to ensure complete isolation and control over one single person.
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Legend to Image: 01. Punta Scorno 02. Punta Caprara 03. Punta Scorno Lighthouse 04. Porto Camogliu (Camogliu Harbour) 05. Punta di La Navi 06. Cala de’ Buoi 07. Semaforo di Punta Scorno
The Outsider
9 or 10 km, the accounts are variable, is the distance between Punta Scorno lighthouse and the closest village. But Cala d’Oliva could not even be defined as a real village, after the Ministry of the Interior expropriated it in 1885 to establish an agricultural penal colony in the island. A constructed settlement thus, in whose regards the inhabitants of the lighthouse would be twice foreigners: territorially and politically. The lighthouse was in fact part of the strictly defined map of ownership which redistributed the areas of the island between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Navy – the latter including the area of Punta Scorno. The foreign character of the lighthouse and their inhabitants has over its history been undaunting and uncompromising. In fact, while the rest of the areas under the Navy ownership were surrendered to the prison administration after the second world war for the implementation of a confinement regime, the ownership of Punta Scorno remained unperturbed until the year 2000, when it was eventually moved over to the Ministry of Defence.7 The history of Punta Scorno since the inauguration of the white, square building hosting the lighthouse in 1859 is punctuated with myths, legends and heroic acts, revolving around the impervious span of sea which separates Sardinia from Corsica. But its real significance lays on his status as something “other”, failing guardian of a stretch of sea which has long lost its mercantile supremacy, at the cusp of an island whose history tended increasingly to a singularity of approach, and its tense relation to it. The Punta Scorno lighthouse, in fact, although being essentially foreign to the carceral system, was able to exploit one of the characteristic products of the penal colony organisation. This was the free labour in the form of sconsegnati, a particular class of inmates which could be trusted with a less rigid regime of control and would thus be sent to work on peripheric areas of the colony, unencumbered by immediate surveillance or the requirement of sleeping inside the central institution.8 These would overcome the ideological barrier of moral depravity which the prison administration would imprint on the inmates and be able to have a direct relation with civil society, and often would be allowed to keep and take care of their own allotments or crafts of their choice.
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Legend to Image: 01. Diramazione Elighemannu (Elighemannu branch) 02. Funtana Elighemannu (Elighemannu spring) 03. Diramazione Case Bianche (Case Bianche branch)
The Shepherd and The Farmer
Before the penal colony, it was the case and cuiles. Although maps from the first half of the XIX century show the Asinara as an almost complete tabula rasa, with the seldom appearance of the larger villages of Cala d’Oliva and La Reale, the reality of the island was one of nuclear settlements, organised around a few houses with annexed agricultural sheds (case) and shepherds ‘colonists’ houses and corrals (cuile). These spread over the vast territory of the island, occupying and using their surroundings through a variety of rights of use obtained from feudal lords since XIV century. The definition of these territory would not be through a legal contract of private property or proprietà perfetta but a constellation of rights – some hereditary, other not – which would stand in their validity only if the land was in continuous use, often with the additional obligation of residence. The definition of territory and control would be thus much more agile and dynamic, but it would result – in the view of a physiocratic administration which would soon take over the control of the land – in extensive use of the soil (uso del suolo estensivo). Such a system would be unacceptable as intrinsically unproductive when compared to the intensive use of soil promoted by the creation of small, well organised plot of lands owned by one person or society through a regime of proprietà perfetta.9 The project of colonisation through the penal colony not only superimposed the carceral structures to the larger villages, but also redefined the nuclear settlements through an identification of productive value towards their surrounding area. Elighemannu and Case Bianche became in this panorama paradigmatic as they acquired the formal definition of colony branches (podere, diramazione). The extant buildings were refurbished to be employed as dormitories for inmates, stables, stores; while the areas surrounding it were subjected to a strategic re-think in view of the wider penal colony functions and necessities. Again, with the re-use of pre-extant elements of organisation of the land, such as terraces built by Genovese workers over the previous century. Elighemannu became then the ideal location to test techniques of reforestation. A lecceto (holly oak forest) was planted around the sloping terrain on the side of this mountainous area. Being the setting up of the lecceto the main subject of the podere efforts, all other agricultural activities in the area where of support and in view of keeping the inmates busy with a constant need of production towards the self-sufficiency of the island. But the setting up of a branch high in the mountains was also instrumental to the control of the infrastructural water works. The area of Elighemannu was in fact characterised by one of the few springs of fresh water with a sufficient flow rate to justify the project of a cistern or dam. A series of infrastructural works would develop from here and bring the water to the nearest main branch of Cala d’Oliva, creating at the same time an irrigation system capable of providing for the in-between area – comprising Case Bianche, Maria Rosaria and the agricultural urban area of Cala d’Oliva.
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Legend to Image: 01. Diramazione Trabuccato (Trabuccato branch) 02. Vineyard, phase 01 03. Vineyard, phase 02 04. Trabuccato wine canteen 05. Tower of Trabuccato 06. Cala Tonnara Vecchia 07. Cala Barche Napoletane 08. Punta Trabuccato
The Vineyard
La diramazione del vino (the wine branch), thus it was known Trabuccato. Extending between a Spanish control tower on the east and the III period of the Cala Reale sanitary establishment on the west, Trabuccato was part of the wider system of the Reale, which presents the more consistent signs of a continuous inhabitation of the island – at least 60 people in 1703.10 The area, allocated to the Navy in 1885 – was incorporated in that of the Ministry of the Interior already in 1912, to perform a crucial strategic role in reaching the planned autonomy and subsistence of the island. Alessandro Doria described the area in 1912 as a productive hub which, notwithstanding the production of beans and cereals, should be mainly commended for an extensive vigneto, covering 5ha. Doria went on auspicating a project for the increase of the productive vineyard to about 15-20 ha. This would have been able to deliver a good variety of local grapes – Cannonau, Vermentino, Pascale, Muristellu, Bovale, Nuragus; so that the island would finally emancipate itself from the import of wine from the mainland.11 The prominence of such an enterprise could be fully understood when thinking that not only the penal colony had to necessarily rely on its own resources in view of its isolation, but also the island had very limited fresh water supplies. Water had in fact to be imported through a cistern-boat for the initial period of existence of the colony and until when infrastructural water works – comprising the creation of dams and artificial ponds – were carried out. The diramazione Trabuccato thus became – through the project of the vineyard and the wine canteens12 – the productive paradigm of the penal colony and its moral reformation programme. The reformatory mission of the colony would be in fact strictly connected with the theory of a reciprocal negative relation of immorality and inertia; which could be corrected through a mean of proper training13 and the instillation of an ideal of productivity. This would lead to a renewed sense of caring for the self and individual possessions, subsistence, and thus, necessarily, moral righteousness. In this sense the instigation of open-air labour as a penal obligation14 – not waged but free and essentially virtuous – would be seen as an improvement of the condition of the colonists, who would through his work cater for the needs of the community. This ideal would thus respond not only to the imperative of moral amelioration, but also to the necessity of reintroducing the inmates into a society from which, with their crime, they had removed themselves. Trabuccato would grow in this way to produce 60 to 100hl of wine per year on a regular basis,15 the vineyard extending over the whole plain in a regular succession of rows, separated by drywalls dividing the different varieties.
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Legend to Image: 01. Campo Faro Cemetery 02. Faristi house 03. Crematorium 04. Pharmacy 05. Hospital 06. Royal Palace, 1st class sanitary station 07. 3rd class sanitary station 08. Showers 09. Historic core of La Reale village
The Sanitary
The first thing welcoming passengers landing from ships suspected of epidemic risk in the Cala Reale porticciolo for their forced quarantine period was a long axial road, carrying through a cast iron gate into a carefully kept garden, finally terminating in correspondence of the central tower of the Sanitary Administration headquarters. The rada di Cala Reale, a vast plain extending across the island from the east to the west and comprising Campu Perdu and Trabuccato, was selected in 1885 to host the sanitary component – lazzaretto or stazione sanitaria – of the planned colonisation of the island. The Asinara penal colony was in fact first planned as a support system for the institution of the stazione sanitaria. This could provide free, abundant workforce for the edification of the various structures – periodi – necessary for the functioning and provision of various stages of surveillance that the quarantine method put in place. The periodi thus extended from Cala Reale towards Trabuccato at a prescribed distance, calculated in order to avoid any risk of contagion between the patients sojourning in them. The stazione sanitaria was eventually suppressed in 1939, essentially transforming Cala Reale into a physical and ideological void nestled between the two productive sections of Campu Perdu and Trabuccato. This was another sign of the increasingly vigorous push by the Ministry of the Interior towards the control of the whole surface of the island. The incorporation of Cala Reale into the Ministry of the Interior jurisdiction was completed at the end of the second World War. This coincided with the implementation of a stricter discipline and the transformation of Fornelli into a high security prison. The Sanitary Administration headquarters were thus adapted to a house of reclusion, where a number of members of mafious association where interned. It was not until year 2000 the building, certainly by virtue of its prominent position and stately appearance, was selected as the headquarters of the new institution which would superimpose its own restrictions onto the territory. This act of appropriation, though not as coercive as the carceral one, would by no means envelop the island in a new set of rigidly defined rules and prohibitions. Thus it stands again. Visible between the rows of tourist boats standing between carefully positioned buoy fields, signalling where mooring is allowed, so as not to mingle with the delicate equilibrium of the underwater environment. Welcoming passengers of regular ferries whose visit in the island protracts for a much shorter time than the quarantine period, although their time would also be carefully articulated into short activities regulating their permanence until the return ferry. A long axial road, going through a renovated cast-iron gate and a re-planted, green through the driest months lawn finally terminating in correspondence of the central tower of a building which, inaccessible as it is, suitably represent the level of control imposed on the island.
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Legend to Image: 01. Ossario (ossuary) 02. Diramazione Campu Perdu (Campu Perdu branch) 03. Campo Faro 04. Campu Perdu, former site of prisoner of war camp 05. Domus de Janas
The Deceased
Open Field is the most probable meaning of the name.16 A fertile plain open to both the mare di dentro and mare di fuori, nestled at the foot of the island’s northern mountain complex. Given its naturally favourable conditions, it is no surprise that this is where the earliest signs of human inhabitation in the island were found; dating back to 4000-3500 BC.17 These are the remains of a hypogeum funerary system, domus de janas (lit. house of the fairies), laying at the base of a temporary settlement, which the nearby cale as docking point for their seasonal visits to the plane. The relation of the plain with death is thus primeval, and it is almost fitting that, diametrically opposite the domus de janas stands the Ossario Austro-Ungarico, an ossuary built during the fascist administration of the island. Its interior houses the bones of thousands of prisoners of war, interned in the island in the First World War, during a critical epidemic of cholera. It was, in fact, in December 1915 that the war administration decided to re-direct all the Austro-Ungarian prisoners of war from the Balkans towards the Asinara, to have them go through a quarantine period before relocating them in various prison camps in the Italian mainland.18 The initial plan for a sequential deportation of the prisoners failed with the intensification of the epidemic. In the span of less than a month, from the first arrival of 4000 prisoners on 18th of December 1915, the number of inmates surged in mid-January to 19.000 units, in front of barely 300 officials and guards. In this regard stories were told of how the increasing gravity of the epidemic would produce so many deaths on the ships queuing to reach the docking area in the island that the corpses would be thrown offboard to avoid contagion, forcing the land personnel to move the docking point from time to time to avoid the increasing presence of putrefied corpses in the waters. Campu Perdu – also possibly in virtue of its proximity to the Sanatory structures in Cala Reale and the presence there of suitable lodgings for the officials – thus became a huge tent-city. This presented a strict division of regiments and functions in the context of which the war emergency administration organised, on the trail of the penal colony regime prevailing elsewhere in the island, various groups of inmates into work-forces to build the increasingly needed structures for the reception and functioning of the prison camp. This would, in the administration view, alleviate the burden of an internment in an island which was by no means prepared to such an overflowing population. In a sense, the decision of the administration was successful, as this opened the way for the implantation of a new diramazione in the area after the conclusion of the war effort. Thus, the bones were unearthed and removed to the ossuary, and the open field ploughed and made productive.
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Legend to Image: 01. Camaldolese monastery, ruins 02. Cala S. Andrea 03. Zone A of maximum environmental protection 04. Punta S. Andrea
The Wall
20th of August 1988. The mayor of Porto Torres, under whose territorial area the Asinara falls, followed by a substantial number of locals, moors just off the coast of Cala Sant’Andrea and jumps in the water. What he set up was a protest against the increasingly strict control of the island by the carceral administration. This had, during the 1970s, started to impose an increasingly seclusive regime to the once productive structures of the island, introducing instead a critically dangerous criminal component, in the figures of members of mafia associations and brigatisti (members of the Red Brigades organization), to the body of inmates which was incarcerated here. The introduction of this component signified the ideological conclusion of both the project of moral reformation through open air labour and, critically, of the dream of a future return of the productive land to civil society and local authority. The new body of inmates would in fact not be allowed to work, and would instead be kept in the strictest seclusion, in accordance to the article 41 bis of the Italian Prison Administration Act. It is at this point and place, with the escalation of protest by the local authority and population, that the project of the Asinara National park started to gain stamina. The choice of Sant’Andrea as the stage for the protest might seem on a superficial level arbitrary. The area is part of the wider region of the island called Stretti – a narrow stretch of land dividing the southern and northern region of the island and offering a position of control of both the mare di dentro (the gulf of Asinara) and the mare di fuori (the Mediterranean). Stretti was initially chosen – in the first proposal for the colonisation of the island – as the perfect site for the edification of a high division wall. This would have separated the northern part of the island – which would have been expropriated from the then inhabitant for the realization of a lazzaretto in Cala Reale and an agricultural penal colony in Cala d’Oliva – from the southern part – where the inhabitant of the island would be relocated in Fornelli and Santa Maria. The plan was subsequently abandoned when it became evident that the needs and territorial project of the penal colony would have required the entire extension of the island, and the inhabitants where instead removed to the tip of the Sardinian main land, where the village of Stintino was formed. Stretti was thus left semi-deserted, guarded only by the ruins of an XI century camaldolese monastery – the cenobio di Sant’Andrea19, from which the cala took its name – and inhabited at times by inmates, which would reside in the small Tumbarino branch to pick wood and produce coal when needed – the area was in fact unfit for agricultural production. Stretti was then used over the First World War as the quarters of a small prison camp, an extension of the vaster tent city in Campu Perdu. Tumbarino became then place of reclusion for inmates convicted for pedophilia. Even in the carceral system of the island these where relegated as outcast to a separate, desolated area to avoid tensions between the inmates and the island society. The historically peripherical condition of the area would thus make for a poor symbolic stage for a protest, if it wasn’t for the planned environmental restrictions emanated in 197620, which subjected some the Asinara to preservation due to their peculiar environmental interest. This is where Stretti, and Sant’Andrea in particular, played a crucial role, as testimony of the shift in the consideration of value attributed to land. From a productive tool – to be exploited to its highest possible degree – to an idiosyncratic character of the nation state, possessing an intrinsic quality as habitat for endemic species and characteristic environment delicately formed in historical times and thus accepted as original. Land would now be considered as possessing an educational value to be internalised not through the double domestication of man through land and vice-versa; but through the learned gaze across the controlled environment, which can attribute value to it for its intrinsic quality and rejoice in its condition at a local and national(istic) level. Thus, Sant’Andrea and Stretti play a strategic role in the early aspiration for the recognition of this new value. It was thanks to it being nestling ground of endangered animal species (the gabbiano corso / Larus Audouinii),21 the presence in the area of endangered floral species endemic to Sardinia, where it registers a unique presence at global level (Fiordaliso Spinoso / Centaurea Horrida)22 and a number of other species and environmental conditions.23 In this sense the access to the waters of the Cala by the same local administration was a deeply controversial act already in 1988. Sant’Andrea area in particular would later acquire an environmental status A24, the maximum degree of protection and represent the invisible demarcation of the area of the island which is left accessible to the civil society and the one which is ideologically fenced off.
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Legend to Image: 01. Diramazione Fornelli (Fornelli branch) 02. Fornelli Cemetery 03. Diramazione Santa Maria (Santa Maria branch) 04. Porto Pagliaccia (Pagliaccia harbour)
The Plain
Pliny the Elder, in its Naturalis Historia, refers to it as Herculis Insulae.25 A primeval myth recounts how the semi-god detached the smaller island from the vaster extension of Sardinia with its strength, clamping it by its southern tip, just about where Fornelli lays. Thus, since antiquity, the detachment became an essential element in the strategical control of the sailing routes which, through the strait named Passo dei Fornelli, aimed to leave the rough, turbulent mare di fuori – the western Mediterranean Sea – and find solace in the placid waters of the mare di dentro – the Asinara Gulf. But this narrow stretch of sea was as much alluring and promising – of serene waters and a 20 miles shortcut through the circumnavigation of the island – as perilous, as attested by the extensive remains of ancient shipwrecks. In fact, the only safe passage through the strait would be signalled by the alignment of two couplings of furnaces (fornelli)26; their control would essentially mean the domination of the route and, by extension, a crucial surveillance role over the traffic in the gulf. Tellingly, the overlay of myth and history in the island ascribes to the mercantile Ligurian elite27 the establishment of a castle high in the Fornelli mountain range. Together with the control of the furnaces and the mooring area, the castle would ensure their supremacy in the area over the XIII and XIV centuries and be instrumental to the suppression and quenching of the continuous raids carried out by Arab corsairs. Concurrently, the areas of Fornelli which were not under the direct interest of sea traffic, were inhabited by Sassaresi and Nurresi shepherds, which had obtained rights of ademprivio and cussorgia28 over the extensive territory which was then under feudal control. The rights of use of land were still intact when the territory moved under the ownership of the state (demanio) in XIX century and were consecutively rendered obsolete with a new push for the enclosure of land as a result of the institution of the agrarian penal colony, of which Fornelli was a strategic outpost on the south of the island. The treatment of the area in Fornelli was in fact a paradigmatic expression of the ethos of what Dino Grandi described in 1941 – during fascist time and with all the pomp of the epoch – as Bonifica Umana, essentially a positivistic view of reclamation of land through the labour of the morally depraved, whose soul would in turn be redeemed and reformed by this very act.29 Grandi thus, although recognising the millenary character of the penalty as punishment and moral reaction, highlighted the intrinsically educational role which a modern agrarian penal colony would have to carry out. This would happen through the instillation of open-air labour, and in particular the practice of gardening in the wider sense. This would enter the ‘rule’ of the inmate life and be instrumental to the achievement of the educational aim of the penalty. Gardening would thus bring together a moral reformation ideal and a set of skills which could assist the former inmate in carving his own position in civil society. Thus, the grand project involving the colonisation of a largely unexploited fertile plain and reclaiming of marshlands surrounding it was put in motion through the construction of the two openair workhouses (case di lavoro all’aperto) of Fornelli (1885) and Santa Maria (1919); which were annexed to the pre-existing core of the shepherd’s village.30 The combination of the two in a vast campaign of land reclamation would eventually lead to the creation of an extensive agricultural area of 700-800 ha. producing a vast variety of legumes, vegetables and hay.
But the educational paradigm was also where the failure of the model started to become evident. Far from being the sign of a successful colonisation campaign and expansion, the later addition of the Santa Maria branch should rather be seen as a signifier of the undaunting resolution of an administration not ready to resign to the increasingly penitentiary nature of the area. This matched a renewed effort – after the temporary cessation of all productive activity and transformation of most of the island in a prisoner of war camp during the first world war – to promoting the suitability for colonisation and belated transformation of the land into a productive civil environment. Even this last attempt would eventually be crippled in 1938, when Fornelli underwent a restauration process which irremediably turned it into a Sanatorio Giudiziario, to front the renewed war effort and the presence of an increasing number of infirm in the prisoner ranks. From there on, the branch started a history of coercive confinement and isolation, reaching its apex in the 1970s, with the enforcing of the recently approved Article 41 bis of the Italian Constitution.31 The result was the production of a disciplining apparatus which abandoned its outlook towards the vastity of the open territory and turned all its efforts on the un-redeeming surveillance over single individuals. Thus, the failure of gardening as a practice was manifested in an area enclosed between tall walls and barbed wire, which internalised the open-air ideal and reduced it to the view of a small square section of sky, as the last gesture of grace and solace towards the regulated routine of an otherwise forcedly idle existence.
Other signs would substantiate the shift in this area. The state of demise of the small cemetery and church, only visible signs of a former prisoner of war camp dating to WWI, stands as explicative of the ingrained character of centralism acquired by the high-security branch. This was the only element towards which the definition of the area was now directed. Positioned in an axial location from the moorings on the strait, the high-security branch stood connected through a bush-tree lined road. This enclosed and directed the view towards the entry gate while climbing the gentle steep which raised the edifice above in a better position of control towards a territory about which it was not interested anymore. The four control turrets at a short distance from the main building articulated the centralism of the prison all the more, directed towards one another but not looking at the land around them, to expand but seal once again its strict perimeter of control
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The Asinara Island
In virtue - or in spite - of its segregation, the island of the Asinara had for century existed in a primeval condition, torn between a seasonal but flourishing coastal activity and a sparsely inhabited interior. Occupying a key strategic position as the breakwater of the gulf of Porto Torres and thanks to its sinuous shape,32 the island offered a safe haven throughout the year and the perfect conditions for the installation of a network of control towers. This made it an essential outpost for any mercantile or political power aspiring to laying pretences of control around the surrounding area of the Mediterranean. The combination of a displacement in mercantile routes from the XVII century and the rise of the Italian Nation State in the XIX century provoked a major shift in this panorama. The same notion of island, on the wane of its relevance in commercial trades, was relegated to a marginal, peripherical role in the politics of the sovereign state, whose aim was now the normalisation of the state of exception of its territory. This materialised in a push towards introversion through repopulation and intensification of agricultural production. In this context, the institution of the penal colony and – for a period – of a sanitary station33 from 1885 on, introduced at one time a forceful definition of the territory into strict, specific units, which represented the new paradigms of the island as projected by the carcereal administration. What was once a territory interested by a dynamic and agile constellation of rights of use, modulating the inhabitant’s pretensions of tenure over swaths of land, became fixed into a long-term project aimed towards the accomplishment of maximum productivity of soil, to achieve an ideal autarchic model of subsistence. The segregation of the island became thus a fundamental aspect in the promotion of the autarchic tenet, which would be instrumental to a later colonisation by a productively fit civil society. The paradigms of the Island would unravel through a series of elements, responding to site specific potential. In recent times, with the superimposition of a new form of control over the depleted and crumbling carcereal model, the paradigms of the island have shifted again. Their complete reorganisation has been elaborated by the entity known as the Ente Parco, responsible for the definition and actuation of the core strategy of the island - now Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara. The new paradigms overlaying on the old ones, these have sometimes incorporated previously defined characteristics, but they essentially differ from them in one critical component. This is to be identified with the selective erasure of the coercive aspect of the paradigm through the construction of surrogate memories and its reversal – the protection of the landscape from any attempt of violence. In fact, while the older paradigms promoted the education and reformation of the colonist-inmate through the productive means of agriculture and gardening, the new paradigms strategically put an emphasis on the preserved landscape, removing value from the destination of use of the territory and placing it onto a number of supposedly original characteristics. These can be experienced through contemplation but, deliberately, not through a direct engagement.
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Epilogue
The Park
The island as a garden is what remains. Once the various degrees of coercive activities have abandoned the scenery of the island, the latter survives as a space of exclusion, enveloped by a sea which clearly demarcates its boundaries. There is a certain symbolic proximity between the status of the island as a territory enclosed by the sea, the garden in its derivation from garth or geard (enclosure, fence) and paradise, from pairidaēza (enclosure, park). Thus it is that the new paradigm of the Park encompasses and assimilates the rhetoric of the enclosure and exclusion in its core, acting as an apparatus of selective erasure and reconstruction of – often violent – history and memories. The whole bent on the pursuit of one single objective, the protection, conservation and restitution of the ideal condition of the island as the primeval garden; the achievement of a perfect equilibrium where what is supposedly proper of the island is promoted, while the rest is slowly eroded from the territory as from memory, crumbling away until finally it disappears. The previous paradigms are thus identified by what remains, a series of signs now devoid of any significance. These, regardless of the bigger, more formally iconic structures and thus part of the reconstructed memory of the park, are a series of drywalls, piers, turrets, terraces, steps, bridges, ditches, pathways; which once served as clear demarcation of the different areas of control and organisation, the gardens of the island. This is the dominion of the scorched Mediterranean scrub; only more regulated, through the rhythmic emergence of marks of enclosure and irrigation, dirt roads and thresholds sinking into it. Small and crumbling structures and buildings emerge from it, looking out towards the innumerable bays and inlets, woodlands and scrub, hills and plains. All encumbered by their own status of controlled ruin,34 yet another method of control to restrict and retain the inaccessibility of certain areas35.
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End notes
1 “Neither vine nor olive trees are born from the sea, but islands are, which give them roots.” Massimo Cacciari, L’arcipelago (Milano: Adelphi, 1997), 16. 2 Since its formation in 1861 the Regno had shown a renewed interest for a crackdown on feudal rights of use and a resulting parcellation of land and redistribution of smaller, easier to control portion of the territory through a legal regime of private property (proprietà perfetta). See Andrea Doria, La Colonizzazione Interna Nelle Sue Applicazioni Col Mezzo Delle Colonie Penali Agricole, 1st ed. (Roma: Tipografia delle Mantellate, 1912), 7. 3 Asinara was granted as a feud to the Marquis of Mores (Antonio Manca) by the Sabaudian Monarch in 1775 for the price of 70.000 Piedmontese lire. It is unclear whether the feud included the whole island or only the area to the north of Cala degli Stretti. By 1885, time of the creation of the penal colony, the land ownership of the Asinara was split in two main areas: to the south of Cala degli Stretti, where Fornelli is located, it was state-owned (demaniale); while the north was interested by late feudal rights of use (ademprivio and cussorgia) where the land had over time been appropriated and enclosed by its inhabitants, by means of rights of property through uninterrupted inhabitation and use. See Andrea Cossu, Xavier Monbailiu, and Antonio Torre, L’isola dell’Asinara, Guide e itinerari ambientali (Sassari: Carlo Delfino Editore, 1994); Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’, 2010. 4 For more information on the notion of Internal colonisation, see Doria, La Colonizzazione Interna; Carmelo Grassi, ‘Colonie Penitenziarie’, in Enciclopedia Giuridica Italiana, vol. III (Milano: Società Editrice Libraria, 1912); Agostino Depretis, ‘Relazione Sull’Esproprio Dell’Isola Dell’Asinara, Presentata Al Consiglio Dei Ministri Il 16 Giugno 1885’, 1885; Sabrina Puddu, ‘Colonie Penali Agricole in Sardegna. Appunti per Una Comprensione Dei Principi Insediativi’, in La Colonia Penale Di Porto Conte. Una Ricerca per La Storia e Il Restauro Dell’architettura Moderna in Sardegna, by Giorgio Peghin and G Zini (Sassari: Delfino Editore, 2015), 69–79; Sabrina Puddu, ‘Agrarian Penal Colonies and the Project of Modern Rurality in Italy’ (Fifth International Conference, Architectural Histoy Network, Tallin, Estonia, 2018). 5 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’, 23-24. 6
Doria, La Colonizzazione Interna.
7 This change of ownership did not influence the life of the inhabitants, the lighthouse was in fact automated in 1977, and in the same year the last fanalista was made redundant. Incidentally, his family lived in Asinara since 1889, in another area under Navy ownership, Cala Reale. Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’; ‘PUNTA SCORNO’, accessed 30 October 2018, https://www.ilmondodeifari.com/punta_scorno_21.html. 8 Antonio Gambardella, ‘Nascita Ed Evoluzione Delle Colonie Penali Agricole Durante Il Regno d’Italia’, Rassegna Penitenziaria e Criminologica, no. 1 (2008): 7–69. 9 For more information on the tentative of instauration of private property, see Doria, La Colonizzazione Interna; Sabrina Puddu, ‘Under the Blue Vault of the Sky. Territorial Discipline and Agrarian Penal Colonies’, Rassegna Di Architettura e Urbanistica, no. 150 (2017): 100–105; Puddu, ‘Colonie Penali Agricole in Sardegna. Appunti per Una Comprensione Dei Principi Insediativi’. 10 Carlo Hendel, ‘Torre Trabucato’, Isola AsinarA (blog), 21 June 2017, http://www.isola-asinara.it/ torre-trabucato/. 11 Doria, La Colonizzazione Interna, 129-152; Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 12 In 1953 the canteen was extended to store up to 1800hl of wine. Carlo Hendel, ‘Storia Agricola e Ordinamento Carcerario’, in Asinara. Storia, Natura, Mare e Tutela Dell’ambiente (Sassari: Delfino Editore, 1993), 53–55. 13 For more information on the relation of training as a reform for moral degeneracy, see Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence: Exhibiting a General View of the National Resources ... (J. Hatchard, 1806); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 14 Dino Grandi, Bonifica Umana, Decennale delle leggi penali e della riforma peniterziaria, vol. I (Roma: Tipografia delle Mantellate, 1941), 41.
15 Giampaolo Cassitta and Lorenzo Spanu, Supercarcere Asinara. Viaggio Nell’isola Dei Dimenticati, VII (Genova: Fratelli Frilli Editori, 2007); Hendel, ‘Storia Agricola e Ordinamento Carcerario’.
16 Cassitta and Spanu, Supercarcere Asinara. Viaggio Nell’isola Dei Dimenticati. 17 Antonietta Boninu, ‘L’Isola Di Ercole’, in Asinara. Parco Nazionale - Area Marina Protetta (Sassari: Carlo Delfino Editore, 2008), 27–34. 18 Luca Gorgolini, I Dannati Dell’Asinara. L’odissea Dei Prigionieri Austro-Ungarici Nella Prima Guerra Mondiale (Bologna: UTET Libreria, 2011); Giuseppe Carmine Ferrari, Relazione Del Campo Di Prigionieri Colerosi All’isola Dell’Asinara Nel 1915-16 (Roma: Provveditorato Generale dello Stato, 1929). 19 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 20 ‘Decreto Ministeriale 12 Marzo 1976’ (n.d.). 21 Direttiva Uccelli 2009/147/CE, all. I) 22 I‘The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed 7 November 2018, https://www.iucnredlist.org/en. 23 For a full list of the protected species present in Sant’Andrea and other zones A in the island see Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 24 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara. 25 Francesco Floris, La grande Enciclopedia della Sardegna, vol. 5 (Cagliari: Edizione della Torre, 2002). 26 Carlo Hendel, ‘I dromi di Fornelli’, Isola AsinarA (blog), 12 June 2018, http://www.isola-asinara.it/i-dromi-di-fornelli/. 27 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 28 Particular uses of extensive feudal property in Sardinia, for more information, see. Giuseppe Todde, ‘Ademprivio (1882)’, in Scritti Economici Sulla Sardegna (Cagliari: Cuec Editrice, 2003), 47-48. 29 For an understanding of the relation of Colonizzazione interna with previous politics and projects by the Sabaudian State and their reflection on the ideas of privatisation of demanial land see the work of Sabrina Puddu, in particular Puddu, ‘Under the Blue Vault of the Sky. Territorial Discipline and Agrarian Penal Colonies’; Puddu, ‘Colonie Penali Agricole in Sardegna. Appunti per Una Comprensione Dei Principi Insediativi’; Puddu, ‘Agrarian Penal Colonies and the Project of Modern Rurality in Italy’. 30 this consisted in 1833 of 8 families. Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 31 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara. 32 Alhthough the island was known as Insula Herculis in antiquity, the name Asinara is in fact a corruption of the later, medieval name Sinuaria, of the sinuous shape. This name is sometimes wrongly attributed to the considerable presence of donkeys (asini) in the island. Michele Gutierrez, Antonello Mattone, and Franca Valsecchi, L’isola dell’Asinara: l’ambiente, la storia, il parco (Nuoro: Poliedro, 1998). 33 Michele Gutierrez, Mattone, and Valsecchi.
34 Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara, ‘Piano Del Parco Nazionale Dell’Asinara - Area Marina Protetta “Isola Dell’Asinara”, Relazione Generale’. 35 The Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara currently counts four terrestrial integral reserve areas, amounting to 590 ha. or 10% of the total surface of the island; and three marine integral reserve areas, amounting roughly to an additional 590 ha. No human access is allowed in integral areas if not for management and research purposes under strict rules of conduct. These were established starting from 1976 and relate to an idiosyncratic character of the nation state, possessing an intrinsic quality as habitat for endemic species and characteristic environment delicately formed in historical times and thus accepted as original. For reference, see Ente Parco Nazionale dell’Asinara.
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