“Not having a place in the world to be driven out to”

This article examines the system for controlling people identified as “Gypsies” in the multilingual Tyrolean region of the Habsburg Empire bounded by three state borders: one with the Kingdom of Italy, to the south; one with Switzerland, to the west; and one with Bavaria, to the north. This is a system that, especially in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, was growing more and more stringent and systematic. Thus, on the one hand, the discussion will close in on the increasingly widespread and insistent production of legal norms aimed precisely at establishing the identity of people, their “territorial belonging,” and managing their freedom of movement across space. To this end—in order to control, regulate, or repress the mobility of people regarded as socially dangerous—a variety of tools and techniques were deployed or perfected. These included eviction and expulsion orders, forced repatriations, extraditions, and even the uptake of photography, dactyloscopy, and anthropometry (by police forces). On the other hand, a picture will be painted of this systemic, multipronged practice by way of some exemplary cases that will enable us to look at it from two sides, highlighting not only the mobility strategies devised by “Gypsies” and vagrants in general, but also a certain difficulty on the part of the Tyrolean administrative and police bodies in giving concrete application to these control instruments.