State-ordered Evictions of Associations

1954-1955

In the mid 1950s, central Italy became a battleground between the Italian national government and its political opponents. One strategy the national government used to undermine its local opposition was to evict clubs and voluntary associations in predominantly leftwing areas from their meeting spaces and headquarters. This map demonstrates how the program of state-ordered evictions of those groups targeted Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, in an intense period of evictions enforced by state police between the summers of 1954 and 1955. Read more...

Eviction places and dates

About this project

This map is a work in progress, a small part of my ongoing experimentation with digital visualizations of historical research. I chose to begin with this map of evictions because animating the unfolding events on a map seemed to be the best way to show the geographic and temporal clustering of the evictions. It demonstrates that these events constituted a shortlived yet intense campaign targeted specifically against central Italy.

In addition, I plan to add more features to this map, accompany it with more explanatory text, as well as publish other visualizations and texts alongside it. Planned features: addition of regional boundaries; detail on the associations evicted at each site and the events surrounding them; detailed map of central Italy; incorporation of bibliographic metadata.

Historical sources

The data on this period of evictions is derived from original research for my dissertation on associations, place and cultural battles in Italy, 1945-1968. The sources on evictions include:

Tools and technologies employed

Laura J. Hornbake, 2013

Creative Commons License

This work by Laura J. Hornbake is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.