Introduction. Displacement, language and historiographical blind spots

This article considers the untranslatability of two key concepts in refugee studies that are also prevalent in international scientific and political discourse: ‘displacement’ and ‘displaced persons’ (hereafter DPs). Although the broader field of refugee studies has been very well received in Italy at both university and school level, these two terms have not yet been adequately represented in Italian. I use the word ‘represented’ deliberately, as this linguistic bias has created an epistemological deficit in Italian historiography, obscuring the state’s and civilians’ roles in dealing with post-Second World War displacement in Europe.Footnote ¹ Of course, linguistic bias is not enough to explain this deficit. Thematic prioritisation within contemporary historiography and the importance placed on specific experiences have relegated the issue of displacement to a secondary level. However, the linguistic dimension – which is a prerequisite for this marginalisation – has received very little scholarly attention. Throughout the history of the Italian Republic, this deficit has contributed to the implementation of problematic legislation regarding migration policies and the management of forced displacement, as in the case of asylum seekers, irregular migrants and Italians who were expelled from the colonies (Colucci Reference Colucci2018, 12–26). This occurred within a framework in which the available categories within a given discursive regime determine what is conceivable and therefore governable (Foucault Reference Foucault1971, 118–123).

When we talk about displacement and DPs, we are referring to a process that began in 1945 and which involved assisting individuals who had been persecuted or deported for political, racial or religious reasons or as a result of war, and who found themselves outside the borders of their country of origin (Economic and Social Council of the United Nations 1946). Between 1944 and 1950, this category was applied to citizens of countries attacked by the Axis powers and to people stripped of their citizenship for discriminatory purposes. For these reasons, the Allies excluded citizens of former enemy countries from the count, leaving Italians and Germans – as well as their own allies – outside the scope of the protection and assistance provided to DPs (Salvatici Reference Salvatici2008). Having clarified the use and meaning of the terms in English, Italian historiography must now consider whether and how to translate them.

Naming displacement: translation and historiography

Translating words in Italian that identify individuals who leave their country of origin or place of residence more or less voluntarily is an age-old problem. In 1986, the translation of Hannah Arendt’s The Jew as Pariah raised the question of how to translate the English term ‘refugees’, which the philosopher had used in the title of her essay ‘We Refugees’ (1943).Footnote ² On that occasion, the translator had opted for ‘profughi’. Although this was a legitimate solution, the focus shifted from the political dimension of escape to the physical and psychological effects of uprooting. In fact, ‘profugo’ refers to a broad semantic sphere that includes those forced to leave their homes as a result of natural disasters.Footnote ³ Words such as ‘rifugiato’ and, better still, ‘perseguitato’ would have placed greater emphasis on the political reasons that had forced Arendt – along with thousands of people in her situation – to seek refuge abroad. However, the two terms are equivalent from the point of view of translatability; it is therefore up to the translator to choose one solution over the other, remembering that they ‘cannot limit themselves to a mere linguistic analysis of the text, but must understand its relationship with the system’ (Mazzara Reference Mazzaran.d.). The frame of reference for historiography is the context in which a term is used, as well as who first used it if it is a neologism. The notions of displacement and DPs originated in a bureaucratic context, only entering academic discourse at a later stage. From 1945 onwards, Anglo-American intelligence services began to use them systematically to indicate the heterogeneous mass of individuals whom the war had ‘scattered’ across Europe. They were imposed from above as the Anglo-American liberation process continued and the demands of Allied governance were enforced on local administrations. As Emma Haddad (Reference Haddad2008, 49–82) has observed, forced mobility does not only describe an emergency; it is the historical product of an international order based on the sovereignty of nation-states and their respective spheres of influence.

Between the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, refugees were considered homogeneous groups defined by ‘nationality’, even when the crises – often linked to multi-ethnic formations – took on an international dimension (Rodogno Reference Rodogno2012). In the post-Second World War period, a much broader phenomenon had to be confronted: millions of refugees of all kinds who needed to be identified and categorised within a new administrative system, implemented by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Initially subordinate to military requirements, this system later became subject to the political contingencies of the Cold War. Hence, anyone tasked with translating these terms into English must take the position – as suggested by Umberto Eco – of a ‘negotiator’ between two spheres: bureaucracy and historiography (Eco Reference Eco2003).

Literal translations of displacement and DPs would be ‘dislocamento’ and ‘persone sfollate’, respectively. Alternatively, DPs could be translated more freely as ‘persone da ricollocare’, referring to their resettlement. Silvia Salvatici was the first Italian historian to publish a comprehensive study of postwar displacement, in which she addresses the terminological issue. Her works seek to introduce the interpretative category of displacement into the Italian historiographical debate. In Senza casa e senza paese, she writes that

Given that the Allies assigned attributes to DPs that are difficult to translate, Salvatici reasonably leaves the English term in the original Italian text. However, the specific terminology relating to displacement has remained confined to the works of a few scholars, often working abroad or writing in English.

The ‘construction’ of DPs was subject to the terminology occasionally adopted by UNRRA and – from 1947 onwards – by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to describe specific conditions within the context of displacement (Cohen Reference Cohen2000). Hence, historians investigating this phenomenon are confronted with a lexicon that cannot always be incorporated into their language. The terms used in postwar welfare vocabulary included: westbound and eastbound, referring to DPs from Western and Eastern Europe, respectively; infiltrators, for people who had entered the Allied zone illegally; unattached, for unaccompanied adults searching for family members; and hard core, referring to the cases deemed most difficult (i.e. the sick, single parents, orphans and the elderly) and unsuitable for repatriation or resettlement. The latter term can be translated in Italian as ‘ricollocamento’. The category of ‘Jews’ was adopted following the much-debated Harrison Report (Harrison Reference Harrison1945), and the term Jewish DPs (JDPs) was also used (Salvatici Reference Salvatici2008). As we will see, the JDPs were the largest group affected by displacement in Italy, and it was mainly through the Jewish question that Italian historiography addressed this issue, emphasising the peninsula’s ongoing role as a country of transit – first for escape, and later for rebirth.

The difficulty of translating this vast specialist vocabulary is not just a technical obstacle. As Quentin Skinner (Reference Skinner, Ball, Farr and Hanson1989) observed, by analysing the changing meanings of words, one can understand the processes of innovation or stagnation in – and within – politics. In this case, the question of ‘what can be learnt about the processes of political innovation by examining the changing meanings of words’ (Skinner Reference Skinner, Ball, Farr and Hanson1989, 6) is particularly relevant. However, the problem of lexical and epistemological non-equivalence between legal categories of mobility in different national traditions does not only concern displacement. Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker1997) has highlighted how the terms citizenship, nationalité and Staatsangehörigkeit refer to distinct and abstract legal traditions, with concrete consequences for the policies of inclusion and exclusion that affect the population. Drawing on Brubaker’s observations, Daniela Trucco (Reference Trucco2020) has recently highlighted the ‘embryonic’ nature of a socio-anthropological approach to the concept of national/cultural ‘citizenship’ in Italy. She attributes this delay in part to the limited presence in Italian research of categories developed within Francophone and Anglophone academia. Furthermore, she suggests that – again drawing on Brubaker’s work – the nation can be considered ‘not as an entity but as a contingent event, a discursive framing and an institutionalised cultural form’ (Trucco Reference Trucco2020, 39–40), which serves precisely as a ‘frame’ for citizenship. This concept overlaps with the categorisation of displacement, given that this phenomenon has, from the outset, challenged the monolithic concept of nationality within a context of mass mobility such as that of the postwar period. While it is not possible to expand on this matter here, it is worth noting that even in the case of citizenship or nationalité, a similar dynamic to that which obstructed the historiographical reception of displacement is at play. In both cases, the absence or belated acquisition of an analytical category has made the phenomenon it designates less visible – and less open to investigation.

A more recent example of the difficulty of translating certain terms from English concerns how the category of gender was received in Italy. For years, Joan W. Scott’s famous essay (‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, translated into Italian a year after its publication in 1986) struggled to establish itself as an autonomous analytical tool in Italian historiography. The term ‘gender’ was translated as ‘genere’, which has a much broader range of meanings spanning from grammatical gender to literary genre, undermining the epistemological specificity of the original English meaning (Fazio Reference Fazio, Scott and Fazio2013, 7–11; Scott Reference Scott2013). The dynamic is structurally analogous to the connection of displacement to ‘profughi’. In both cases, the translation is not neutral but produces a semantic shift that affects the historiographical visibility of the phenomenon.

Finally, displacement can be linked to the concept of diaspora insofar as it involves crossing borders. In terms of translatability, the concepts are similar in that they both refer to the dispersal of a community across a vast territory, forced to leave for religious and/or political reasons. At the international level, both have been subject to a process of semantic globalisation that has broadened their usage to the point where they seem self-evident, in a context where ‘the word now seems to speak for itself’ (Dufoix Reference Dufoix2014, 88).

Between 1944 and 1950, a large proportion of the survivors of the European Jewish diaspora came to be classified as DPs (Lavie and Swedenburg Reference Lavie and Swedenburg1996). However, the two phenomena were not identical. Many Jews from Western Europe hoped to one day return home; being displaced was often a temporary experience, unlike that of their co-religionists from Eastern Europe (Sarfatti Reference Sarfatti1998). Even if we consider displacement to be a catalyst for new diasporas, as suggested by Robin Cohen (Reference Cohen1997), the two categories nevertheless have distinct genealogies and horizons: one rooted in a millennia-long history of dispersion, the other in a postwar bureaucratic apparatus. If the diaspora is described as ‘a state of tension and limbo between where you come from and where you are now, and its effects … pain, heartbreak and nostalgia, but also fluidity and intermingling’ (Zaccaria Reference Zaccarian.d.), displacement can be reinterpreted in similar terms. Both categories challenge the symbols of national identity and the nineteenth-century concept of ‘homeland’, or ‘native land’, which no longer necessarily coincide with one another, as also highlighted by postcolonial studies (Williams Reference Williams1999). This approach furthermore enables us to grasp the formation of cultural geographies that have developed as a result of transnational movement and uprooting rather than entrenched national belonging (Dharwadker Reference Dharwadker2001).

Ultimately, juxtaposing categories of very different origins – from citizenship to diaspora, from gender to nationalité – with a concept that originated in a bureaucratic context may seem risky, but it is precisely this intersection that allows us to consider displacement as a historically renegotiable category (Hall Reference Hall and Rutherford1990). Thanks to an epistemological shift, the concept moved from early twentieth-century political science to the administrative sphere, before entering gender studies and contemporary historiography, a century later.

From bureaucracy to historiography: the semantic shift of displacement

To understand why displacement should be considered a historically renegotiated category, we must establish when its use began to shift from the social sciences to the field of historiography. In the postwar period, displacement was defined as ‘the accustomed ailment of the century’, a condition perceived as chronic and destined to mark the decades to come (Hulme Reference Hulme1953, 191).Footnote ⁴ The scale of the phenomenon was unknown. Studies conducted from the second half of the 1950s onwards confirmed that Nazi persecution and the ensuing conflict had forced around 50 million people to migrate between 1938 – the year of the Evian Conference on the refugee crisis, which exposed the international community’s unwillingness to address the displacement of Jewish refugees fleeing the Reich – and the end of the war (Crainz, Pupo and Salvatici Reference Salvatici2008, 59–74; 193–208; 209–222). This figure included evacuated people and internally displaced persons (IDPsFootnote ⁵), DPs in the strict sense of the word, as well as people deported to forced labour camps (Proudfoot Reference Proudfoot1956; Nasaw Reference Nasaw2020).

With the launch of the Allied forces’ repatriation plans, the number of DPs receiving assistance began to decline as early as 1946, stabilising at around one million in subsequent years (Cohen Reference Cohen2011; Nasaw Reference Nasaw2020). At the end of the Second World War, the establishment of a welfare programme managed by the Allied forces through UNRRA and, subsequently, the IRO, led to the first studies on displacement – considered the precursors of contemporary refugee studies (Skran and Daughtry Reference Skran and Daughtry2007).Footnote ⁶

In the 1950s and 1960s, Hannah Arendt – a prominent academic and member of the Jewish immigrant community in the United States – voiced her opinion on the issue of DPs from outside the sphere of international governance. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), one can trace an initial shift of the concept of displacement into a philosophical-political sphere, from a critical perspective. Talking about human rights and minorities, Arendt called DPs a concept coined during the war with the intention of ‘eliminating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence’ (Arendt Reference Arendt2009, 388).

According to Arendt, the rise in the number of de facto stateless persons (i.e. individuals deprived of the protection of their own state and, consequently, of the right to citizenship) after the war had revealed the inadequacy of traditional solutions, namely the relocation of people on the basis of their affiliation to a nation-state, as had happened after the First World War. However, immediate repatriation or naturalisation policies were lacking in the post-Second World War period; the category of displacement facilitated – in Arendt’s view – the conversion of concentration and internment camps into reception centres (Arendt Reference Arendt2009, 388 ff.). The philosopher identified statelessness – rather than displacement – as ‘the most modern mass phenomenon’, denouncing the fact that its management had led international powers and organisations to opt for a ‘colonialist’ solution based on the creation of new states (e.g. Israel) and on the displacement of populations as an administrative act. This was exemplified by resettlement, which had produced new categories of DPs, such as Palestinian refugees (59).

Since 1945, the term displacement has become widely used in the English-speaking world. Its meaning has evolved in relation to postcolonial, racial and gender dynamics (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Reference Fiddian-Qasmiyeh2020). Particularly in the early 1980s, when arrivals of non-European DPs added to the flows from Eastern Europe, this interest also extended to the academic sphere.Footnote ⁷ A neoliberal interpretation developed that was based on the so-called ‘myth of difference’: the opposition between a ‘normalised’ political refugee – white, male and anticommunist – and an ‘atypical’ non-white refugee in search of better economic conditions (Chimni Reference Chimni1998, 355–360).

The renewed academic focus on displacement must be considered within this framework. A turning point in political science occurred in Reference Marrus1985, when Michael Robert Marrus published The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. The novelty of this work lay in its application of a long-term historical perspective to a field that, until then, had been predominantly the domain of political science and jurisprudence. However, while highlighting the continuity and discontinuity of the European experience of displacement, Marrus did not systematically address new non-European migrations or the socio-economic causes of mass displacement. In other words, his approach was macro-political; what was still missing was a micro-social analysis of the phenomenon. Mark Wyman filled this gap with his DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–51 (Reference Wyman1989), which confirms the particular sensitivity to the subject of English-speaking academic world. It is based on direct interviews with former DPs and staff at DP camps, and on an oral history approach that, at the time, was considered closer to anthropology than to historiography.

Nevertheless, until the mid-1990s, refugee studies remained a challenging field for historians. Conversely, anthropologists and their ‘fieldwork’ stood out within a research landscape that was largely focused on the political management of the issue. A good example is Liisa H. Malkki, author of a study on displacement caused by internal conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi, who lamented the absence of historians in a field she regarded as multidisciplinary but still far from true interdisciplinarity (Malkki Reference Malkki1996). In contrast to legal-sociological approaches, which tended to regard DPs as a generic category to be included in a humanitarian and state-centred management framework, Malkki argued for the need to historicise displacement. While acknowledging ‘the importance of the moral, ethical, and political motivations that clearly lie at the core of humanitarian intervention’, she proposed an approach based on ‘a radically “historicizing humanism” that insists on acknowledging not only human suffering but narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory’ (398).

At the time, the dialogue between postcolonial cultural anthropology and refugee studies revealed that an interdisciplinary approach to displacement could lead to methodological progress. To this end, it had to be examined with tools that could not be limited to governance.

The late 1990s marked the beginning of a new phase, spearheaded by the anthropologist Doreen Indra, who introduced the category of gender into refugee studies in Engendering forced migration. Theory and practice (Reference Indra1998). Indra recognised gender as a factor in persecution, seeing it as a possible basis for applying the 1951 Refugee Convention and granting refugee status (Rossi Doria Reference Rossi Doria and Doria2007, 224–239). Incorporating gender studies into scholarship on forced migration and displacement has helped to open up new lines of research linked to labour studies and migration studies. This has shed light on the complexity of reception and resettlement policies in postwar Europe, which also varied according to gender and the labour demand of the countries of destination (e.g. the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, South Africa, etc.).

It was at this point that Italian historiography began to contribute to the process of renegotiating the concept of displacement. Salvatici (Reference Salvatici, Asquer, Bellavitis and Chabot2019) has highlighted how some of the most innovative research in refugee studies has emerged from the intersection of gender and displacement, particularly in relation to the postwar period. The Holocaust is another topic that has benefited from engagement with the concept of displacement. Atina Grossmann’s work on camps for JDPs in former Nazi Germany and on their interaction with the civilian population has added complexity to a central field of contemporary European history. In doing so, she problematises the relationship between the defeated German population and Hitler’s legacy (Grossmann Reference Grossmann2002; Reference Grossmann2007).

Finally, it is worth mentioning Peter Gatrell’s comprehensive works on The Making of the Modern Refugee (Reference Gatrell2013), dedicated to the history of refugees in the twentieth century, and The Unsettling of Europe (Reference Gatrell2019), which explores the anxieties of a continent reshaped by postwar migration. In this latter work, Gatrell does not analyse the concept of displacement in a purely bureaucratic sense; rather, he highlights its political and economic implications. To this end, he demonstrates how nation-states benefited – or failed to benefit – from hosting ‘uprooted’ Europeans, including those excluded from the UN mandate (such as Germans or prisoners of war), also in relation to the need to rebuild the productive sections of the population that were decimated by the war (Gatrell Reference Gatrell2019). These approaches show that, wherever possible, an interdisciplinary approach to the concept of displacement has fostered new strands of social history, engaging with gender studies, labour studies and Holocaust historiography.

Italy as a laboratory of displacement (1945–1950)

The historiographical overview provided in the first part of the article will now be complemented by a description of the historical and geographical context of postwar Italy. This will shed light on the state of Italian research on displacement and explain why this research is informed by the study of the Jewish question, including that of the JDPs.

Thanks to its central position in the Mediterranean, the peninsula has long acted as an important crossroads for transoceanic, transcontinental and Middle Eastern migration routes. In the postwar years, the easy accessibility of its land and sea borders meant that Italy was at the centre of the flows of DPs crossing the Alps to reach the Mediterranean coast. These crossings often took place in the US Occupation Zone of Austria, which – like Germany and Italy – was home to DP camps administered by the Allies. From 1946 onwards, Italy sought to develop its own domestic policy, trying wherever possible to turn the passage or rejection of European DPs at the border to its advantage. In this way, foreign Jews – DPs but not exclusively – travelling from Central and Eastern Europe along the Bricha route (Hebrew for ‘escape’) reached the southern coasts clandestinely via Italian territory. From there, they would begin their aliyah to Eretz Israel more or less legally (Voigt Reference Voigt1996, 229; Villa Reference Villa2005; Marzano Reference Marzano2019).Footnote ⁸

However, the DPs were not the only people using the Italian border crossings to seek refuge and emigrate. The chaos at the Alpine borders enabled an underground movement of high-ranking Reich officials and Wehrmacht war criminals, all seeking to evade justice, to develop: the so-called ratline (Goldhagen Reference Goldhagen2003). Faced with the arrival of various types of DPs and refugees, the Italian institutions had to invent a national aid system to deal with the emergency. In an attempt to comply with Allied directives, they used both new administrative bodies – such as the Ministry of Post-War Assistance – and ministries that were a continuation of the Fascist past, such as the Ministry of Italian Africa (Canepa Reference Canepa2016).

Against this backdrop of tensions and negotiations with the Allies, the involvement of Italian governments makes the methods they used to organise a relief network for refugees – particularly Jewish DPs, the main group affected by displacement in Italy – of particular interest. They were supported by other aid organisations in this endeavour (Di Padova Reference Di Padova2017). In the case of foreign Jews, or Jewish DPs, the Italian governments were able to draw on the collaboration of the American Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency, UNRRA, the IRO and other international organisations, as well as the Jewish communities.

On the other hand, postwar Italy was unprepared to receive the thousands of DPs who crossed the Alpine borders between 1945 and 1950. The desire to present itself as a reliable ally motivated the Italian political class to accept the compromise that was proposed following the 1943 Armistice: in exchange for substantial economic aid and more favourable treatment during the peace negotiations, Italy was to demonstrate its cooperation by supporting the Allied military effort and accepting the presence on its territory of UN organisations that would oversee the management of the DPs (Ciampiani Reference Ciampiani2002).

Hence, displacement turned Italy into a genuine ‘transit country’, through which thousands of mostly European foreigners passed. Estimates based on documentation held at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome and the UN Archives indicate a stable annual presence on Italian territory of around 30 thousand DPs (Mongardini Reference Mongardini2023). Successive governments dealt with this unprecedented situation fairly competently, albeit with persistent legislative and racial biases stemming from the legacy of the ventennio (Pavone Reference Pavone1995).Footnote ⁹ For example, they created dedicated ministries and an International Aid Administration to oversee foreign funds. Furthermore, Fascist internment camps were converted into refugee and DP camps. This process did gradually familiarise the governments with the mechanisms of international organisations, which would soon afterwards change the history of Europe (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2005).

In the absence of any recent large-scale immigration flows into Italy, and in an attempt to cope with a demographic pressure that was deemed excessive, between 1945 and 1950, Italy adopted a migration policy aimed at encouraging emigration to alleviate demographic pressure (Fauri Reference Fauri2015). Hence, Italy’s net migration balance in relation to the structure of the domestic labour market was expected to return to positive levels, as in the years before the war. This would avert the risk that DPs who received assistance on Italian soil might be tempted to stay.Footnote ¹⁰ From this perspective, the displacement and postwar migrations triggered dynamics at European level that, in the 1950s, would lead to economic agreements between Western European states based on the free movement of employees and aimed at ‘distributing’ and ‘relocating’ the surplus labour force, which also included DPs (Gatrell, Reference Gatrell2019).

Ultimately, Italy managed to exploit the presence of DPs on its territory for diplomatic ends. By paying a substantial sum earmarked for aid, it joined the IRO and secured its admission to the United Nations; in 1954, it ratified the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (Law No. 722 of 24 July 1954). This ratification marked the end of a period of experimentation in the field of international aid, in which Italy played an active role and Europe as a whole served as a vast laboratory for the ‘new’ postwar humanitarianism (Delle Donne Reference Delle Donne2004).

Institutions, media and postwar languages: displacement in Italian public discourse

However, this intense activity involving control, assistance and negotiation doesn’t tell us how displacement was conveyed to the Italian public. In fact, the gap between the practical management of DPs and their representation in public discourse is key to understanding the subsequent difficulties in historiographical reception. An analysis of the language adopted by institutions in the media demonstrates that displacement was marginalised even in the immediate postwar period, without the category being firmly established through English terminology.

A unique insight into this process is offered by the use of audiovisual media as tools for institutional communication. These tools were meant to illustrate the efforts of the new republican governments in the context of postwar reconstruction (Lusanna Reference Lussana2022). On 19 January 1946, during the first De Gasperi government, the Italian Government Delegation for Relations with UNRRA ratified a supplementary agreement with UNRRA that redefined the responsibilities regarding assistance.Footnote ¹¹ The protection of Italian civilians was entrusted to the government, with possible material support from UNRRA, while the latter remained responsible for the management of DPs, with the assistance of the Italian authorities where necessary. Held in Rome, the event was broadcast by the Nuovo Notiziario Luce, showing footage of De Gasperi and Spurgeon Milton Keeny – director of the Italy Mission – as they smiled and shook hands, surrounded by photographers and representatives of the government and the international organisation. Interestingly, the reporter prioritised the food crisis over the management of DPs, thus confirming the government’s desire to shift the focus to a domestic issue more closely aligned with public concerns.Footnote ¹² La Settimana Incom adopted a similar tone to the Nuovo Notiziario, providing more institutional coverage but without making any explicit reference to international aid. The same report featured a visit by a group of children supported by UNRRA to St Peter’s, where they were received by Pope Pius XII. Although he publicly thanked the organisation, the pope did not clarify the children’s identities, and it is not clear from the footage whether they were DPs.Footnote ¹³

Italian institutions were, therefore, familiar with the problem of displacement and tried to tackle it on a practical level. However, they consciously adopted a national vocabulary and an institutional perspective that neutralised the specific nature of the matter, framing it within the categories of public order, aid and reconstruction. This approach is confirmed by the actions of Giulio Andreotti, then undersecretary to Prime Minister De Gasperi, overseeing the entertainment sector. Between 1947 and 1950, he acted as a mediator between the film industry, the workers and the requirements of the IRO, directly overseeing the clearance operations of the camp that had long been established within Cinecittà and visiting the studios (Degrada Reference Degrada, Malavasi and Monreale2016).

In the episode of La Settimana Incom broadcast on 12 November 1947, the visit by Andreotti and the Honourable Alfredo Proia to the studios, which had been partially refurbished after the clearance of the DPs, is described through a visual juxtaposition: images of the camp – washing hanging out to dry, field kitchens, children playing among ruined buildings – are juxtaposed with the new studios, busy workers and state-of-the-art equipment. The reporter speaks generically of a ‘refugee camp’, avoiding any mention of the international nature of the DPs or their management by the IRO. The voice-overs, which poetically capture the adaptability and resilience of the camp’s inhabitants, help to convey the experience of displacement as an incident devoid of political and legal significance.Footnote ¹⁴

Another episode of La Settimana Incom, broadcast in 1948, marks the beginning of a fully-fledged narrative of Cinecittà’s ‘rebirth’, which excludes the DPs. The involvement of international organisations is swiftly dismissed with phrases such as the ‘odyssey of the stateless’, while the interview with Andreotti celebrates the return to film production as proof that ‘the long-standing and delicate problem of refugees and war victims’ is moving towards a definitive solution.Footnote ¹⁵ The opening of the set for Quo Vadis? symbolised the end of the ‘refugee camp’ and Cinecittà’s reconversion into a ‘workshop of fairy tales’.Footnote ¹⁶

The case of Cinecittà shows that displacement, despite being an intrinsic part of its identity at the time, was not mentioned even where direct observation might have facilitated a clearer conceptualisation of it.Footnote ¹⁷ Paola Masino’s reportage about the DP camp, La Valle di Giosafat (Reference Masino1945), gives a powerful and detailed description of the refugees’ living conditions. It denounces the promiscuity, overcrowding and existential limbo that characterised the camp, depicting Cinecittà as ‘the icy void of a disused workshop’, which is suddenly filled with ‘two thousand and one hundred creatures, swept … [here] by a catastrophe for which they are not responsible’, crammed into the film studios in makeshift cubicles with no privacy. Yet, despite the powerful portrayal and the overtly investigative nature of the reportage, the reportage does not use the English term for displacement; the subjects observed remain a general mass of ‘refugees’.

This linguistic silence helps us to understand why postwar cinema also failed to present displacement as a recognisable theme to the public. Think of Jack Salvatori’s Umanità (Reference Salvatori1946), set in Cinecittà itself and focusing on the lives of refugees and DPs in the immediate postwar period. The film is undoubtedly an important historical document, not least because it includes an aerial shot of the famous Studio No. 5, which at the time was transformed into a shanty town using makeshift panels and booths.Footnote ¹⁸ Gino Cervi played the lead role of a UNRRA official, and the style evoked Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (1946). However, Umanità never left a mark or entered collective memory. Although displacement was the narrative premise, it remained undefined even on a cinematic level, relegating the experience of Cinecittà to the background of a classic Italian-style romantic comedy. Despite originating from the same place and adopting different languages, cinema and journalism thus suffered from the same limitation: an inability to translate a postwar experience into a category of public discourse.

From the outset, this persistent, multi-level lexical absence helped to define the interpretative framework through which the phenomenon could be understood and narrated. This ‘voicelessness’ was passed down over time, creating a historiographical void that will be examined in more detail in the rest of this article.

The Italian historiographical gap: displacement without a name

As we have seen, displacement was physically present but lexically absent from Italian public discourse in the postwar period. It is not surprising, then, that Italian historiography was slow to make it a subject of independent research. Without a fixed category in the national lexicon, the topic was initially addressed from the perspective of the Jewish question. In La porta di Sion (Reference Toscano1991), Mario Toscano reconstructed the journey of foreign Jews travelling from Eastern Europe to Palestine via Italy along clandestine routes, despite British restrictions. Klaus Voigt’s Il rifugio precario (1996–98) highlighted Italy’s role as a place of refuge for European Jews and the continuity between interwar and postwar experiences. Voigt regarded the end of the war as a decisive turning point, arguing that Italy remained a fundamental transit point, not only for those seeking refuge but also for those who wanted to build a new life there. Despite their importance, these publications did not trigger a historiographical debate on displacement in Italy but were categorised as studies on the Holocaust and concentration camps.

In fact, subsequent developments have occasionally led Italian historians to address the topic of camps, albeit at different times and in different ways. From the mid-2000s onwards, the focus of migration studies shifted to include not only postwar refugees, but also Italian concentration camps. Research has shown that the camps remained in use after the war, being converted into reception camps for refugees, evacuated people and individuals under special police supervision (DPs) passing through the country (Capogreco Reference Capogreco2004; Sanfilippo Reference Sanfilippo2006). In Reference Stefanori2017, the scholarship was further enriched by a more systematic and comprehensive analysis in the form of Matteo Stefanori’s Ordinaria amministrazione. Gli ebrei e la Repubblica sociale italiana. Based on extensive and rigorous archival research, it describes the provincial internment camps for Jews established during the Italian Social Republic.

However, in Italy, interpretative frameworks that bring together fragmented experiences and timeframes – such as those linked to displacement and decolonisation processes – have been slow to develop not only in the case of DPs. The same difficulty has also emerged in Italian historiography on forced migration in the postwar period, specifically with regard to Italians returning from the former colonies. Pamela Ballinger (Reference Ballinger2007) has observed that ‘no synthetic history of these Italian population movements between 1945 and 1955 exists’, but she adds that these events could be seen as a prime area for developing ‘a greater dialogue with the extensive ongoing debates over decolonization, postcoloniality, citizenship, and immigration elsewhere in Europe’ (740–741; see also Ballinger Reference Ballinger2020). Silvia Salvatici’s research also dates to this period. Thanks to her international background, she was able to engage directly – and practically – with the operational categories of displacement, first conducting research at Potsdam Universität and then doing fieldwork for the International Organisation for Migration in Albania and Kosovo at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s. The synchronicity of these two experiences is no coincidence. Ballinger and Salvatici worked in contexts where the concept of displacement was lexically and analytically accessible, which proves that linguistic bias delayed its acceptance within Italian-language historiography. Furthermore, both grappled – from different perspectives – with the categories of mobility that Italian historiography struggled to incorporate into interpretative frameworks capable of challenging the narrative – and the repression – of Italy’s colonial and racist past. Rather than expanding on these reconstructions, this article examines a precondition: the relationship between lexical availability and historiographical visibility. Salvatici’s attempt to make this category even more operational is also evident in Naufraghi della pace. Il 1945, i profughi e le memorie divisive d’Europa, edited by Guido Crainz, Raoul Pupo and Salvatici herself (Reference Crainz, Pupo and Salvatici2008). Its approach has the merit of situating displacement within the broader historiography of European memory, placing it in dialogue with complex experiences – to which I have alluded – that are equally challenging for Italian historians of the new millennium.

The spread of displacement studies in Italy led to several local history research projects focusing on the reception centres for DPs. It is worth mentioning the doctoral thesis by Cinzia Villani (Reference Villani2009), in which she traced the mountain routes used by Jewish DPs to enter Italy with the help of expert guides, and a journal article in which – following in Salvatici’s footsteps – she uses English terminology.Footnote ¹⁹ Credit is also due to two young scholars – Chiara Renzo and Francesca Di Padova – who, talking about Jewish displacement, have begun to systematically use English-language terms. Renzo (Reference Renzo2021; Reference Renzo2023; Reference Renzo, Salvatici and Urbano2024) confidently employs English terminology to describe the experience of Libyan Jews who had begun to travel to the newly established State of Israel. Moreover, her 2023 monograph on Jewish DPs incorporates previous research on this topic, for which she drew on English-language literature. However, an edited volume by Salvatici and Urbano (Reference Salvatici and Urbano2024) that includes her contribution on child welfare in the Italian Jewish community does not systematically adopt English terminology.Footnote ²⁰ Di Padova, on the other hand, has focused on the demographics and composition of the displaced population within the Italian context, assessing the extent to which the link with gender studies can prove useful (Di Padova Reference Di Padova2017; Reference Di Padova2018).

Nevertheless, in this context of persistent historiographical repression, displacement has not disappeared from the cultural landscape. Instead, it has taken subterranean paths, re-emerging in indirect forms outside historical discourse.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, as the memories of survivors and their political use took centre stage, this historiographical gap was addressed to some extent through testimonial literature, which became the only way to process an experience otherwise obscured by memoirs focusing on the Shoah rather than its aftermath. In Italy, this literature produced two seminal works: Primo Levi’s Se non ora, quando? (Reference Levi1982), and I clandestini del mare (Reference Ascarelli Sereni1973) by Ada Ascarelli Sereni. While the latter narrates displacement through a memorial framework, in Levi’s historical novel, the term displacement itself is explicitly named, rescued from lexical oblivion and recognised as a distinctive historical condition. Testimonial literature thus emerges as the sole epistemological space in which displacement finds explicit – albeit minimal – recognition by witnesses or their direct descendants (Mongardini Reference Mongardini and Almonte2025). This supplementary function of testimonial literature is not an Italian anomaly. As Ljuba Jurgenson (Reference Jurgenson2016) has observed with regard to Gulag literature, when documentary traces are absent or destroyed, literary testimony emerges as the primary – and sometimes only – form of historical processing, filling a void that institutions have been unwilling or unable to fill. More generally, testimonial literature tends to emerge where other forms of documentation and commemoration are precluded, acting as a space for negotiation between individual experience and collective memory (Loddo Reference Loddo, Carrara and Neri2022). In the Italian case, this dynamic takes on a further specificity: it is not the archive that is incomplete, but the lexical category with which to interrogate it. The witnesses to displacement – especially Levi, who wrote from a multilingual and trans-European experience – possessed an experiential lexicon that Italian historiography had not yet acquired.

Hence, although progress has been made in recognising and using English-language terminology, the analysis of existing scholarship reveals a persistent tendency in Italian-language historiography to use generic, uninformative synonyms such as ‘profughi’ and ‘rifugiati’. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, while at other times they are supplemented by ‘evacuated people’ or ‘returnees’. However, as noted at the beginning of the article, using these synonyms can lead to oversimplifications or even confusion. And yet, the exemplary cases presented here highlight the need to bring the category of displacement to the fore – including visually, in the titles. In sum, a linguistic problem remains, which obstructs the use and study of a very specific category that has shaped the history of the Italian Republic and which is confined to the realm of local history – or, at most, Jewish history.