Reframing Asinara: From ‘the Devil’s Island’ to an ‘uncontaminated nature paradise’

Like many other islands in the Mediterranean, Asinara, located to the north of Sardinia, has been a prison island for a long time. Unlike other islands, however, which often housed other forms of use and activities together with their prisons, Asinara was emptied of its population and used solely as a detention centre for more than a century. It was first an agricultural penal colony and a quarantine station for maritime travellers, then a concentration camp, and finally a maximum-security prison, where the ‘enemies’ of the Italian state (terrorists and mafiosi) were detained under extremely harsh conditions (this has led to it being called by sinister epithets such as Devil’s Island, or Italian Cayenne). Since only prison-related activities were allowed on the island, human presence has remained very limited. As a result, although its vegetation and fauna have been massively altered over the years, Asinara has retained a seemingly ‘uncontaminated’ appearance. Today, this allows the island to be reframed as a park and natural oasis, on the one hand rehabilitating its past (after all, it was the prison that kept out land development) and, on the other hand, stimulating the arrival of visitors. As far as the past is concerned, the available visual images are very limited, and consist of a few postcards and snapshots, offering an institutional image of the prison facilities or a ‘normalising’ view of the activities conducted outside them by the relations of the correctional officers (the inmates did not have cameras, and their point of view can only be grasped through their writings). Much richer is the visual material produced after the prison’s closure, both by the main Italian television networks and by the Park Authority itself. This material was analysed in order to study the changing image of an island that, after becoming a gulag, is now portrayed as paradise.