Days before the Grand Council of Fascism deposed him on July 24, 1943, Mussolini met with his police chief, Renzo Chierici, to discuss the system of police confinement and civilian internment. Allied bombings had made provisioning the island colonies virtually impossible, and public-security officials recommended the evacuation of the detainees to mainland camps. The problem was not small: Ustica held 2,500 people, Lipari 500, Ponza 700, Ventotene 833, and Tremiti 594. Unfortunately, Chierici reported, the mainland camps administered by the Interior Ministry were completely full. During the previous three years of war, the sites of confinement, internment, and concentration had multiplied, until all of Italy was honeycombed with camps and other settlements of internees. In addition to the five thousand internati and confinati on the islands, the Interior Ministry had interned or otherwise confined in provinces throughout Italy another fourteen thousand political suspects, ex-convicts, gypsies, foreign Jews, enemies nationals, and civilians from occupied territories. Castles, villas, schools, abandoned buildings, and other sites held anywhere from a few dozen people to hundreds or thousands. For example, between 1,500 and 2,000 foreigners, mostly Jews, lived in barracks behind barbed wire in the concentration camp at Ferramonti, in Basilicata.

Italy had become the Fascist archipelago. When the regime began interning civilians en masse in 1940, it deployed the very same normative practices, facilities, and personnel that constituted the confino di polizia system.