My dissertation reconstructs the final years of the Italian communities of Egypt. It follows a series of events from 1937 to 1967 that propelled vast changes in the collective and personal realities of the seventy thousand Italian immigrants in Egypt, including their repatriation and dispersion from Egypt and acquisition of refugee status in 1950s and 1960s Italy. “Fuori Tempo/Out of Time” shows how national and regional notions of identity connect to life histories and have been recorded in contemporary historical consciousness. I argue that as the Italians left Egypt, identities shaped by the historical circumstances that had brought them to and kept them in Egypt were brought to the surface in ways that shaped and continue to shape the present. My dissertation examines the history of these different yet intersecting identities, using the experiences of the Italians of Egypt to interrogate the production of historical consciousness at various scales (among these personal, familial, regional, and trans/national).