The aim of this book is to fill a research ‘gap’, by providing a ‘systematic study’ of Italian Fascism's use of ‘internment in an asylum as a tool of repression for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) people, as an alternative to confinement on an island, prison or home arrests’ (p. 1). Moving from a ‘micro-history’ – the internment in 1928 of G., a 45-year-old homosexual man born in a small village in Piedmont – the volume highlights, through different kinds of sources but especially medical files, the practice of expulsion from the allegedly ‘sane’ national ‘body’ through sanitary detention, of individuals attributed with a homosexual orientation or behaviour.

According to the author, the research gap to which she refers is part of a larger one in the general literature ‘on the history of homosexuality in [Fascist] Italy’. Romano identifies ‘one of the main reasons’ (p. 5) as the fact that ‘the Italian legislation’ ‘reinforces an outdated mentality, rooted in prejudice, that imposes serious limitations to historical research in this and related fields’. She mentions in particular the ‘directives contained in two Italian decrees, no. 281 of 1999 … and no. 196 of 2003’ (p. 4). The ‘research gap’ seems to depend mostly on a lack of interest about the topic by Italian academic institutions and mainstream researchers. In fact, in my opinion these legislative restrictions are likely to be a minor factor that did not prevent access to sources including personal records such as private letters. Moreover, the scarcity of studies about LGBT people in Italy seems to be more significant with regard to the postwar than the Fascist period. In fact, important studies on the latter have been available for more than a decade. Romano's study sometimes draws on questionable assumptions or interpretations. For example, she claims that Italian ‘traditional family values were crumbling under the pressure’ of Fascism, without providing evidence for such a strong statement (p. 2). Similarly, she argues that with the ‘Nuremberg Trials … [Germany] condemned its past, drew a line in the sand and admitted its terrible mistakes’ (p. 5), not considering that the trials were organised by the Allied occupation authority in Germany, while in the same period, and even in the following years, German public opinion in general reacted in a very ambiguous way to the question of punishment of Nazi crimes.

Romano has investigated medical files from the period 1922–31 in the Collegno mental health hospital archives, in particular those from hospitals in the Turin area. She consulted all admission files for the years 1922 (the year of Fascism's rise to power in Italy) and 1926 (a year ‘generally considered a turning point, as the dictatorship starting implementing its most fierce repression’, p. 3). She also looked at all the files from the beginning of G.'s internment in Collegno (November 1928) to the day when he was sent to the Racconigi psychiatric hospital (September 1930). The author argues that ‘homosexuality does not appear to have been a specific concern among Collegno and Turin practitioners at the time …’ and that ‘it was presented as a relevant factor when tackling mental and moral degeneracy, but there is no indication that it drew specific attention or cures’ (p. 87). Given the subject of the research, some further reflections about this lack of medical concern about homosexuality per se could have been profitable. A discussion of the history of emotions and its methodology would have also been appropriate.

The author rightly describes as ‘exceptional’ G.'s ‘31-page autobiographical statement’. Written before his internment, Romano retrieved it from G.'s medical file and describes it as ‘clearly conceived to be a public document’. In this statement, G., who was educated as a lawyer, accused his brother, who had caused his arrest and subsequent forced hospitalisation for his ‘homosexual tendencies’. While the intention of the statement is unclear, its content is very interesting: G. in fact admits being ‘homosexual’ but denies being a (passive) ‘pederast’ and at the same time, claims he is not a congenital homosexual, his homosexuality being just a ‘deplorable sexual habit’ (p. 38). In this regard, as Romano points out, G.'s ‘argumentations on his homosexuality are … crucial to understand a gay man's strategies for survival at the time. Whether he agreed or disagreed with psychiatric theories on homosexuality, he was ready and able to deploy them, in order to escape persecution, isolation, imprisonment or internment’ (p. 44). Romano underlines G.'s ‘considerable courage and pride’, given that his statement contained ‘a rather threatening underlying message instead of showing remorse’. As interesting as G.'s success in eventually being released from internment, is the fact that other, less culturally educated LGBT people, suffered very serious consequences from their internment in the same medical institutions and in the same period. Romano gives the example of an ‘unmarried farmer’ described as a ‘delirious impulsive homosexual’, interned in 1930 shortly after G., who was one of 100 patients who underwent lobotomy in 1937 (p. 100).

In conclusion, the material analysed is rich and challenging. Romano also depicts with accuracy the international context in which, between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, theories of eugenics and about ‘inherited characteristics that would show if an individual had a congenital predisposition to degeneration and crime’, such as those of Cesare Lombroso, circulated in Europe. However, the author does not include foreign internment procedures and practices regarding LGBT people and the general repression and persecution of homosexuality in other countries under similar totalitarian regimes. Such a discussion would have been important to clarify if and why the ‘Italian way’ of pathologising homosexuality followed certain common patterns.