The Slovenian and Croatian Roma in Italy during the Fascist Regime and the Second World War: Internees, Deportees, and Refugees
The aim of this seminar is to analyse the destiny of the Roma and Sinti families who lived in the border regions between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between the two World Wars. Particular attention will be paid to the treatment of “Gypsies” by the fascist regime in the ex-Hapsburg territory named Venezia Giulia, the so-called province of Ljubljana annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in April 1941, as well as the period when those territories became a part of the Reich (September 1943 – May 1945). Given the wide-ranging overlap of political and border contexts, we need to carefully reconstruct local events and family histories through the bottom-up approach, based on an interdisciplinary perspective (connecting history and anthropology) and multi-situated research (in different national archives and between Roma families).
Paola Trevisan
Paola Trevisan holds her PhD in Cultural Anthropology and Gender Studies from the University Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana (Spain). In 2016 she was a research fellow at the Mandel Center of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. with the project “From Expelled Foreigners to ‘Dangerous’ Italians: Roma and Sinti Families in Italy under Fascism”. Later, she worked as a researcher at Free University Bolzano (Italy) and at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (France) expanding her research geographically to Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia and chronologically from 1922 to 1946. Currently, Dr. Trevisan works on the project Encyclopaedia of Nazi Genocide of Sinti and Roma directed by Heidelberg University (Germany). Her research lies in the interdisciplinary field of anthropology and history, working “in the field” and in archives.