Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

To explain (i) the continuous and productive stay of the Italian community in Libya after independence and (ii) when and how their situation started to deteriorate, leading to their expulsion in 1970, I conduct a historical social network analysis on the Italian community. I assume that either (hypothesis 1) the Italian elite was integrated with the local elite, or (hypothesis 2) the Italian community as a whole was integrated in the Libyan society.  For both hypotheses, I assume that the connections within and between the Italian community provided its members with a set of possibilities and constraints, hence a certain degree of power, which may have impacted the possibility to preserve and promote their interests, thus to stay in Libya after independence. To test hypothesis 1, I reconstruct the egocentric networks of the Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli, Camillo Facchinetti (1936-1950) and that of his successor, Vitale Bertoli (1950-1967), by studying their private correspondence, both on a quantitative (Python and Gephi) and qualitative level -to which I add complementary qualitative sources. To test hypothesis 2, I conduct a network analysis on the Italian community as a whole, extracting the quantitative data from the community’s parish registers. Subsequently, I produce a “network prosopography”, based on Italians’ oral and material recollections. A first exploration of Mons. Facchinetti’s private correspondence confirms the validity of my first hypothesis: Facchinetti’s social network was crucial for the recovery of the Italian community in Libya after WW2 and for the Italian clergy to be spared from concentration camps.