Tripoli Province

Tripoli Province (Provincia di Tripoli in Italian) was one of the provinces of Libya under Italian rule. It was established in 1937, with the official name: Commissariato Generale Provinciale di Tripoli. It lasted until 1943.

The "Provincia di Tripoli" was located in northern Italian Libya, next to Tunisia. Its administrative center was the city of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast and was administratively divided in 6 sections (called "Circondari" in Italian):

The province experienced a huge economic growth in the late 1930s, with a great urban development of Tripoli while Italian colonists cultivated lands (that had returned to native desert for many centuries) and improved Italian Libya's agriculture to international standards. This was accomplished even with the creation of new farm villages.

Most of the population was muslim, but there was a growing community of Catholics due to the Italian colonists immigration. In 1940 there were more than 70,000 Catholics (of which 65,000 were Italians).

Additionally there were nearly 18,000 Jews in the Tripoli area. Indeed, after the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911, the Jews made great strides in education and economic conditions: at that time, there were about 21,000 Jews in the country, the majority in Tripoli. In the late 1930s, Fascist anti-Jewish laws were gradually enforced, and Jews were subject to moderate repression: still, by 1941 -due even to the partial rejection of those laws by governor Italo Balbo- the Jews accounted for a quarter of the population of Tripoli and maintained 44 synagogues

The province from 1939 was considered officially part of the Kingdom of Italy, with the same laws. It was one of the 4 new Italian provinces of the so-called Quarta Sponda ("4th Shore") of Mussolini's Imperial Italy. Indeed, on January 9, 1939, the colony of Italian Libya was incorporated into "Metropolitan Italy" and thereafter considered an integral part of the Italian state (the French, in 1848, had incorporated French Algeria in the same manner).

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