Lampedusa: The Road to Marginality

This paper takes into consideration the role of the State - the Bourbon first, and then, after 1861, the Italian - with regard to Lampedusa from 1843 to approximately the turn of the century. It is exactly the way in which the State has conceived of and acted upon this small island in the middle of the Channel of Sicily that can be considered a primary cause in determining the crisis of the relationship between man and environment as well as the general conditions of marginality and dependence. The roots of these phenomena in fact have to be sought in State selective intervention or non-intervention in the first fifty years of colonization of the island and in the political and administrative choices made in that period.