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ОглавлениеChapter 1
Chronotopes of Hope
It is useless to establish whether Zenobia should be classified as a happy or an unhappy city. It is not into these two species that one should divide the city; instead, one should ask whether it belongs to the category of those cities that continue to shape their wishes throughout the years, or to that of the cities that are erased by them.
—Italo Calvino (1972)
Genoa is the city of parting and oblivion. It is hard to stay, but it is even harder to leave and then return.
—Maurizio Fantoni Minnella (2014)
By presenting a series of chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981) that offer an insight into Genoa’s ever-changing quotidian since the 1970s, this chapter begins to investigate the tangle of place and hope that allows space to become “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). The chronotopes it outlines depict a specific dimension of Genoa’s time-space as an arena for the experiential modulation of economies of hope mediated by communist and capitalist political projects: dreamworlds (Buck-Morss 2002) toward which the Genoese strove at different times in the history of their city, and that manifested through the urban everyday and its spatialities (Harvey 2000; Lefebvre 1991). These dreamworlds are not examined in their disembodied, ideal-typical form, but rather as a plurality of communist and capitalist cultures (Yanagisako 2002) emerging in and through the quotidian through the friction between globally traveling discourses and local circumstances (Tsing 2004). My purpose is to outline emergent forms of hope along with their blends of emancipatory qualities and mystifications (Bloch 1986). As Ernest Bloch (1998: 341) suggested, hope dwells in a “region of the not-yet” that is characterized by “enduring indeterminacy.” Hope’s dissatisfaction with the present and its orientation toward the future (Berlant 2011: 13), however, shape the “margin of maneuvrability” and the “opening to experimenting” (Massumi 2002: 212) through which this affect may foster initiative and the push for change (Crapanzano 2003: 6). The hope I explore here is the kind of potentially actionable affect that is driven by utopian dreams of modernization and the promise of happiness (Buck-Morss 2002; Miyazaki 2006). As an orientation toward the future that anticipates a happiness to come while simultaneously signaling a critical occupation with the past and the present (Ahmed 2010: 181; 174), the hope I tackle in this chapter is more specifically a “plausible narrative of progress” (Rorty 1999: 232): one that has the power of replicating itself interdiscursively across ideological boundaries, both on the left and on the right (Miyazaki 2004). This is the form of hope that drives the pursuit of a better life—a notion that has its roots in Christianity as much as it draws on the faith in progress promoted by the Enlightenment (Mayr 1992: 117). In Genoa’s case, hope includes first and foremost the possibility to make a living and improve the circumstances of one’s life.
In his ethnography of Zambia, James Ferguson (1999) provided a poignant analysis of the disconnection experienced by people when the modernization prospected by industrialization was suddenly derailed. In a similar vein, writing about how young Ethiopian men lost hope as neoliberal reforms curtailed their employment opportunities, Daniel Mains (2012) described the stagnation and despair that unfold when the narrative of personal and collective progress is interrupted. While the African settings of Ferguson’s and Mains’s ethnographies are quite different from the circumstances at hand in Genoa, the underlying collective narrative—the promise of modernization, its interruption, and the ensuing stagnation and despair—is remarkably similar. In Genoa, too, the relative prosperity and stability brought about by twentieth-century industrialization found an abrupt end in the 1970s. Blue-collar jobs that, up to then, had been readily available to the point of attracting a considerable migration from the south of the country became increasingly scanty. The tertiary sector that had been experiencing steady growth due to the expansion of the public administration and the state-run industries also slowed down. In the face of rising desperation, political parties and powerful individuals fastened their iron grip on the scarce employment opportunities, which they kept bartering in return for favors, cash, and power. It is in this context, I suggest, that the spread of north Atlantic neoliberal ideologies with their rhetoric of meritocracy brought about a new wave of hopefulness in the 1990s in the face of Genoa’s continuing decline. The neoliberal hope that spanned the decades of the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s pivoted on urban revitalization to prospect the possibility for change. This entailed in the first place the promise of employment and opportunities in the rising sector of tourism and cultural consumption; it also prospected a better quality of the urban everyday: one that entails, among others, increased safety from crime and violence and, with it, the fruition of a public sociability that, in much of Italy, is conceptualized as not just a desirable but also a necessary part of one’s life in the city (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2007; Moretti 2015). Yet, embedded as it was in a capitalist dynamic whereby, as Laurent Berlant (2011: 171) put it, “if you’re lucky you get to be exploited, and if you’re lucky you can avoid one more day being the focus of a scene that hails and ejects you when it is your time to again become worthless,” even this neoliberal version of hope was of the cruel kind, in that it, too, contained the seed of its own failure (Berlant 2011). I conclude this chapter with the discussion of how, by the early 2000s, even the hopefulness brought about by Genoa’s revitalization became collateral damage to the dystopic, and equally neoliberal, rhetoric that “there is no alternative” (Harvey 2000: 17, 2007: 40). There is no alternative to the austerity measures imposed on all but the very wealthiest in the name of Italy’s membership in the European Union, nor is there any alternative to the precarity of people whose disposability has become the only certainty in their lives (Butler 2006; Mole 2011).
The Beginning of the End
This story begins in the 1970s. As the seat of several of Italy’s heavy industries and a vertex of the “industrial triangle” that had driven the country’s economic miracle of the 1960s, Genoa by then had a longstanding industrial tradition, though one that had grown in the shade of the Italian state and its subsidies. The cityscape of those years bore witness to this industrialization as well as to the ravages of World War II: even the Carlo Felice opera theater was still a pile of rubble defacing Piazza de Ferrari, the heart of Genoa’s downtown. The imposing early twentieth-century city center was constantly grey with soot, and the bleak industrial peripheries had cannibalized previously pleasant maritime and rural villages. As a constant reminder that workers had had to choose between their life and their livelihood, until the early 2000s Cornigliano’s steelworks kept spewing fumes that reeked of rot and spread cancer. In the meantime, a swath of the centro storico had been bulldozed and turned into the Centro dei Liguri administrative complex—yet another example of failed modernist architecture. Known as sopraelevata, a junction was built to connect the city center with the industrial peripheries; while aiding transit, it visually and physically separated the old city from the sea. Bourgeois neighborhoods such as Albaro continued to revel in their architectural and natural beauty, but the rationality of modernist urbanism did not contemplate issues of quality of life—let alone aesthetic pleasure—for working-class neighborhoods (Avila 2014; Lefebvre 1978: 77).
Figure 2. Genoa’s neighborhoods. Map by Jessica M. Moss and Luciano Rosselli.
As to the centro storico, this is how, in 1974, popular Genoese singer and songwriter Fabrizio de Andrè described it in his Città vecchia (Old City) lyrics:
If you walk along the old docks
In that thick air loaded with salt and swollen with smell
There you will find the thieves the murderers and the strange guy
Who sold his mother to a midget for three thousand lire.
Back then, a considerable portion of the centro storico was still in shambles: piles of rubbles memorialized the wounds inflicted by allied bombs during World War II first, and, after that, by the continuing neglect exercised by local administrators. Many of its buildings were empty, deserted by all but the occasional drug addict, and infested by the hordes of rats that nested in the medieval sewage system and were said to outnumber residents seven to one. The viable apartment complexes were sparsely populated. Many of the ground floor spaces that had, in centuries bygone, hosted thriving businesses were now used for storage—and, when the first immigration waves from the Maghreb began in the 1970s, for cramming people in diminutive rooms in return for exorbitant rents. Floating above the dark, damp spaces of poverty, frequently empty frescoed apartments and penthouses with roof balconies suspended over a breathtaking view of the sea bore witness to the grandeur of the past, ready to spearhead the gentrification process that was to begin twenty years later. Back in the 1970s, however, the neighborhood catered predominantly to working-class families of mixed Genoese and Southern Italian provenance; elderly Genoese; hippie, anarchist, and Ultraleft communes; and a heterogeneous crowd of drug addicts, pushers, prostitutes, and smugglers.
In those years, many of the residents of Genoa’s better-off neighborhoods such as Albaro would not have been caught dead in the caruggi (the alleys of the old city, as they are called in local dialect). “Too dangerous” was the general opinion. Following dynamics common to other South European cities (McDonogh 1987), for people from the lower-middle-class to upper-class uptown (circonvallazione a monte) who lived a short walking distance from the centro storico, a cautious excursion to this part of town had the prurient thrill of slumming or, better said, social tourism. After World War II, young men used to take walks through the centro storico to demonstrate their masculinity and bravado. Young women, instead, avoided it altogether, or took only quick trips to its well-known stores—but never alone. In the Genoa of those years, going to the centro storico had taken on the connotation of a “discesa agli inferi”: a descent to the netherworld (Fusero et al. 1991: 86) that few were willing to undertake.
Drugs and the City
The Genoa of the 1950s, wrote sociologist Luciano Cavalli (1960), had been a “divided city” where neighborhood boundaries marked the separations between social classes as well as the intensification of the mistrust between the communist working classes from the peripheries and the Catholic bourgeoisie of better-off neighborhoods. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the spread of Marxist ideas and the growing dissatisfaction with Italy’s hierarchical and exclusionary society, its authoritarian and elitist education system, the exploitation of labor, dominant sexual and family mores, and even institutionalized communism (in the form of the Italian Communist Party) led to the emergence of youth movements all over the country, but especially in the industrial North (Balestrini and Moroni 1988). Like elsewhere in the Western world, hippies, anarchists, and other social movements often experimented with new social arrangements such as communes (Balestrini and Moroni 1988: 46; Ginsborg 1990: 298–309) where the youth could emancipate themselves from their family—though not from patriarchy per se (Ginsborg 1990: 306). In Genoa, such communes established themselves predominantly in the centro storico, where the youth known as contestatori (dissenters) made a home for themselves by squatting in rundown vacant buildings. Those were also the years of the spread of light drugs such as marijuana and hashish, initially sold by individuals who traveled back and forth from Great Britain or even India as part of their existential quest.
By the mid-1970s, however, the spirit of the movement had changed. As it faced the crisis of industrialism, the steep decline of employment, and an unrelenting censorship even at the hands of a parliamentary Left that was concerned about losing its legitimacy with mainstream voters, the optimistic rebelliousness of 1968 gave way to radical hopelessness (Balestrini and Moroni 1988: 369). Managed primarily by mafia cartels, heroin made its appearance, spreading especially among the youth; if, in 1976, there were approximately 10,000 heroin addicts, by 1978 this number had jumped to 70,000 (Balestrini and Moroni 1988: 385). In Genoa, heroin trafficking gained a foothold primarily in the centro storico.
Indeed, the dark, labyrinthine vicoli (alleys) were just as hospitable to spacciatori (dealers) as they were to tossici (short for tossicodipendenti, drug addicts). In the 1970s and the 1980s, seeing a man leaning idly against a wall, seemingly doing nothing, was sufficient for most passersby to take a detour. It was not the spacciatore per se that caused so much fear. The source of much concern, instead, was the predatory behavior of some of his customers: the “violent and destructive subjectivities” generated by the “structurally imposed everyday sufferings” (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009: 19) of those who had nothing to live for except their daily dose (fix). As many city residents proactively avoided the centro storico, tossici claimed large sectors for themselves. Among these were the Plastic Gardens: the product of the botched modernization project that, in the late 1960s, had led to bulldozing and redeveloping the ancient Via Madre di Dio area of the centro storico. Encased among tall walls and buildings and notorious for their modernist squalor, the Plastic Gardens were utilized exclusively by tossici. Everybody else carefully avoided them.
Well into the 1990s, a walk around the centro storico meant almost invariably coming across at least a few signs of the tossici’s activities. At times, these would include mattresses strategically placed in less-trafficked corners; most often, however, the presence of tossici was signaled by their discarded syringes. It was not unusual to spot tossici, squatting against a wall, as they did their buco (injection). Just as often they could be seen as they waddled around with an easily recognizable gait, panhandling hesitant passersby. Back then, comedians and ruthless teenagers alike did not think much of mocking their characteristic way of asking, “Scusa, ce l’hai cento lire?”—“Excuse me, do you have 100 lire to spare?” Most people, however, felt at least somewhat anxious in their presence, fearing an attack or an unpredictable reaction from those who so blatantly defied bourgeois norms of sobriety and self-reliance.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Genoa ranked third in Italy for overall crime rate, but it came in first for juvenile crime (a ranking sociologists blamed squarely on addictions; see Arvati 1988: 49). Indeed, the 1970s were tense years in Genoa. Violent crime such as robberies in banks, restaurants, and post offices as well as kidnappings was on the rise, and so were burglaries and thefts. This is when the city earned a reputation as capitale italiana degli scippi (Italian capital of purse snatchings) that never went away. Whether they were committed by tossici, or whether the culprits were sober, able-bodied individuals, the majority of crimes in the old city were highly gendered purse- and jewelry-snatchings: young men riding a scooter or on foot would approach a woman, grab her purse or necklace, and vanish in the labyrinth of vicoli. Occasionally, the robbers would also shove their victim to the ground, dragging her if she resisted. Jewelry snatchings could be even more vicious, in that necklaces, bracelets, and watches were forcefully ripped off the victim’s body, causing bruises and cuts. Injured and traumatized, victims of a scippo would go to the carabinieri precinct, only to be told that her chances of recovering the stolen goods were about nil. At times, however, the crimes attributed to tossici would be far more violent, often entailing stabbings and beatings administered for the sake of stealing enough cash for the next fix. “If you have to be the victim of a violent crime,” people used to say, “pray that the robber is a professional and not a tossico.” Professional criminals were allegedly more lucid in evaluating the ramifications of their actions. Tossici, instead, were the shadow cast by the supposedly rational life of an industrial city unable to handle its decline. As such, they served as the ideal folk devil in the Italian imaginary.
Ever since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, tossici were accused of contributing to the spread of the disease. The moral panic that had been triggered by heroin addicts’ casual needle-sharing practices extended to their habit of dumping their used syringes on sidewalks but also on city lawns, playgrounds, and beaches, thus exposing law-abiding citizens and their children to a possible source of contagion. In those years, Alessandra, a teacher at a local school and a centro storico resident, accidentally stepped on a syringe while walking to work. The needle penetrated her rubber boots and pierced her skin. Frightened, she immediately ran to the nearest hospital to request a tetanus shot and to undergo a series of HIV and hepatitis tests. The latter she had to repeat periodically for several months after the accident. Even though up to that point she had enjoyed her home in the not-yet-gentrified centro storico—so close to work but also theaters, museums, and shopping venues—only a few months later she moved out. That incident, she told me, had been pivotal in her decision to look for a home in a semi-rural neighborhood where, she said, “everybody knows everybody else and no one does drugs.”
In those days, much of the social fear about tossici and their syringes converged upon the centro storico; however, the area behind my uptown apartment was carpeted with used needles, too, and so were urban parks and secluded corners in middle-class neighborhoods. At that time, the local newspaper frequently reported news of syringes buried needle-up on local beaches, planted behind train seats, and maliciously stuck in all sorts of places where unsuspecting citizens could be stung and potentially exposed to hepatitis and HIV contagion. Upon discovering the advantages of proactively performing the role of the villains that had been imposed on them anyway, some tossici took to using dirty syringes as weapons for their robberies: after all, demonized minorities are often empowered by the frightening auras built around them by concerned majorities (Appadurai 2006). Tossici’s favorite targets were small business owners, especially in the centro storico, but at times they would attack passersby, too. Yet again, such incidents invariably struck a deep note with the local social imaginary, and were widely publicized in the media.
Then, in the early 1990s, heroin went out of fashion and was largely replaced by different drugs such as cocaine and designer drugs (Avico et al. 1992) In Genoa, the sight of heroin addicts dragging themselves through the centro storico and panhandling passersby became increasingly rare. As a social worker cynically put it in recent years, “By now most of the tossici from the 1970s and 1980s have died of an overdose, HIV or hepatitis. The few historical tossici who survived are so old and malandati (in bad shape) that they are getting ready to retire.”1
The Years of Lead
Drugs were hardly the only scourge that afflicted Genoa in the 1970s. Named after a 1981 film by German director Margarethe von Trotta, Italy’s 1970s went down in history as the “years of lead” (gli anni di piombo): a label that effectively reflects the somber atmosphere of that decade as a time in which violence, fear, and hopelessness permeated much of everyday life in most Italian cities.2 As one of Italy’s foremost industrial cities and the historical seat of a strong resistance to Mussolini’s Fascist government and its German allies, Genoa had always been a stronghold of the Left: not just the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party, or PSI), but also the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, known as PCI; Arvati 1994). However, in the late 1960s the culture of older workers who had largely submitted to the PCI’s line of command and its unions was increasingly challenged by a new type of worker: one that was both critical of official party lines and willing to explore new strategies of resistance. The contribution of Southern Italian immigrants to the emergence of new forms of dissent was fundamental: upon encountering the well-organized, but also regimented, communist culture of unionized Northern factory workers, they helped to shape novel forms of struggle that defied existing models (Dogliotti 2004: 1155; Balestrini and Moroni 1988: 67). Genoa thus became the hotbed for a plethora of movements known as sinistra extraparlamentare (extra-parliamentary Left) or ultrasinistra (Ultraleft), which were characterized by their radical opposition to a PCI they saw as too conservative, and by their eagerness to explore new forms of social struggle. Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle), Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy), and XXII Ottobre (October 22) were some of the most visible groups active in the Genoa of those days. The latter, in particular, carried out the kidnapping of Sergio Gadolla (the heir of one of Genoa’s foremost industrial families) as well as a robbery that caused the accidental death of a man. In 1974, magistrate Mario Sossi had all of the XXII Ottobre group members tried and convicted. Concerned with its own public legitimacy, the PCI dismissed XXII Ottobre members as criminals rather than freedom fighters; to some of the extra-parliamentary Left, instead, this trial became a turning point of sorts (Dogliotti 2004: 1661). Soon enough, the Red Brigades—Italy’s foremost Ultraleft group—became active in Genoa (Dogliotti 2004: 1159). On April 18, 1974, a Red Brigades commando kidnapped Sossi, whom it set free only a month later. On June 8, 1976, Red Brigades members shot and killed Attorney General Francesco Coco and the two police officers who escorted him. If Sossi’s kidnapping was a sign that the Red Brigades were taking aim at the state, the murder of Coco was their first politically motivated assassination (Dogliotti 2004: 1161). The attacks drove an even deeper wedge between the parliamentary Left and their extra-parliamentary interlocutors over the issue of violence as a tool of political struggle. The PCI recoiled at the violence, and Genoa’s unions organized a protest against the assassination (Dogliotti 2004: 1163). The Red Brigades, however, were not deterred by the workers’ dissent. Between 1975 and 1981, their Genoese branch carried out one robbery, injured sixteen people (often by kneecapping them), and committed nine public assassinations (Cavazza 2013). Their last victim was unionist Guido Rossa, whom they killed in 1978 for denouncing brigatista Francesco Berardi.
Being in a public place, in the Italy of those years, could be a risky proposition. Right-wing terrorists pursued their “strategy of tension” by carrying out indiscriminate bombings: they planted explosives in crowded piazzas, trains, and railway stations. Their goal was to terrorize the population in order to pave the way for a coup. The Ultraleft, instead, was more discriminating in selecting its targets. However, Red Brigades attacks still took place in the street, in broad daylight, and under the eyes of terrorized bystanders—a strategy that was utterly unsettling for the general population in that it further undermined increasingly obsolete assumptions about the safety of the urban everyday (see also Eyerman 2008); taking advantage of Genoa’s convoluted map and its thick web of shortcuts (Dogliotti 2004: 1173), their commandos always managed to escape. Soon enough, Genoa became known as the “capital of the Red Brigades” (Dogliotti 2004: 1177). The tension was so high that the sight of a five-pointed star (the symbol of the Red Brigades) spray-painted on a city wall would immediately trigger media coverage and a formal investigation. In turn, this general anxiety led to an escalation of repressive policing surveillance measures legitimized through the need to prevent terrorist acts. In those years, being searched by the police was a frequent occurrence, and long beards and parkas could trigger a frisking at any time. Very little ground was needed to obtain a formal warrant: my childhood home was once searched by the police on the basis of my father’s visual likeness to a known terrorist.
Though the latter experience injected a degree of anxiety into my family life, as a child I usually found myself watching from the outside. Like many children my age, I normalized the violent world I grew up in because it was all I had ever known. At that time, people in my generation were too young to feel the full political and social import of the events; however, occasionally the angst of adult family members would filter through to us. Barely a pre-teen, on the day of Coco’s murder I was on a city beach. When the management announced the terrorist attack on the loudspeaker, my mother stuffed my friends and me into her Fiat 500 and hurriedly took us all home. The news had frightened her, and she was worried about the possibility of unrest. And when, on the morning of March 16, 1976, Italy’s President of the Council of Ministers Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by a Red Brigades commando that slaughtered his escort only to kill him fifty-five days later, the middle school I attended immediately canceled all classes and sent the students home, where we would presumably be safer. Not only was this decision indicative of the role of the family as the ultimate bulwark of Italian society in the face of a weak state, but it also indexed the general astonishment at the news. Aldo Moro was an embodiment of the institutions, and the whole country was dumbfounded at the audacity of the terrorist group and the vulnerability of the state (Wagner-Pacifici 1986: 90). On that day, my father plunged into a deep anxiety from which he never recovered.
Violence and the threat thereof, those days, had become part of the quotidian. Going to the bank, the post office, or a restaurant could mean being held up in one of the robberies conducted to subsidize the Red Brigades and other extra-parliamentary groups. Going grocery shopping could get one caught between security and the dissenters seeking to carry out an autoriduzione (self-discount) event, and walking by a street protest could get you trapped in violent skirmishes between protesters and the police. For teenagers in my generation, violence was a constant possibility, especially in those high schools that had a consistent presence of either Ultraleft or Neo-fascist activists. Brawls and picketings were frequent occurrences. In discussing his fascination with the local Ultraleft as a precocious fourteen-year-old, Genoese novelist Roberto Demontis (born in 1964) wrote: “Living in a troubled world is very reassuring for a teenager, you feel better when you are surfing an earthquake than when you are caged in the nightmare of a life in which each day is the same. This is why, when you are young—or better, a teenager—you create so much trouble. At times you do it just to see what happens (per vedere l’effetto che fa) for the youth, living in troubled times is wonderful, because you can mirror yourself in the disquiet, you recognize yourself in it.”3 Perhaps the charm of the disquiet is one of the reasons why in those same years one of my childhood friends robbed a local branch of the Neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano: after stealing a typewriter, he and his friends set the suite’s door on fire. They were caught right away; they all earned the sobriquet of “baby terroristi,” and my friend, the only one in the group who had barely turned eighteen, ended up in jail.
My high school was a little different in that it was a numerus clausus public liceo linguistico attended predominantly by academically ambitious girls (and a few boys) with little time for extracurricular activities.4 Yet our school was not spared the violence, either, and we frequently had to evacuate due to bomb threats. Not that we were apolitical: on the contrary, we had an active collettivo femminista. On some level, many of us had developed the awareness that being driven young women in a Catholic country where not even the Ultraleft was interested in seriously supporting our struggles was a political challenge in its own right (Ginsborg 1990). Dressed in hippie garb, we would read feminist magazines such as Effe and Noi donne, eagerly discussing women’s reproductive rights at every opportunity, penning feminist slogans in our journals, and yelling back in unison at anyone who tried to convince us that our place was going to be in the home. The price we had to pay for our own small-scale resistance, but above all for the successes in matters of family law, reproductive rights, and access to employment at the hands of women activists who were a decade older than us, was a backlash: a capillary symbolic and material violence that did not pursue a forthright exclusion, but rather a surveillance and policing mechanism that perpetuated women’s subalternity by means of an incessant public harassment (Gardner 1995). Implicitly meant to remind women and especially vulnerable young girls that they did not belong in public, this harassment manifested as the barrage of slurs, insults, and even occasional physical attacks that could be meted out to us by men of all age groups in any public place: Genoa’s streets and piazzas, but also its stores, churches, buses and trains, parks and beaches, workplaces and schools. In all cases, such aggressions were blamed on the victim’s alleged breach of the unwritten rules of modesty (Guano 2007).
If Genoa’s streets were a war zone for assorted class and gender struggles, my Genoese friends who are older than me still remember how the local university, too, was a political battlefield. Ultraleft activists had the power to shut down the university, canceling all classes, exam sessions, and thesis defenses at will. Some of the faculty and several of the students had close ties to the Ultraleft, and the tension was high. Students would often extract a “18 politico” (“political C-”) from their professors: a passing grade granted to all students, regardless of performance. As to the local faculty, they positioned themselves on both sides of the barricade. In 1978, a Red Brigades commando kneecapped Christian Democratic law professor Fausto Cuocolo in front of his terrorized students. In 1979, Italian Literature professor Enrico Fenzi was arrested for being a member of the local Red Brigades branch.
The City of Shattered Mirrors
The last clamorous chapter in the history of Genoa’s Red Brigades was the 1980 police raid of a covo (hideout) during which all the members of the local colonna (pillar) were killed. By then, the assassination of Guido Rossa had deprived the Red Brigades of much of the support they still enjoyed among the local working class and the intelligentsia: up to that point, they had been the imprendibili (“impregnable”; see Cavazza 2013) who eluded all police investigations and frightened bourgeoisie and state representatives alike. Yet with Rossa they had assassinated a worker, and this compromised the solidarity of even much of the most militant Ultraleft. Politically motivated violence did not disappear from Genoa—the kneecapping of Ansaldo Nucleare CEO Roberto Adinolfi was conducted as recently as May 2012 at the hands of an anarchist commando—but it dwindled to a barely noticeable level. In the meantime, increasingly deindustrialized Genoa had become what historian Paul Ginsborg called a “ghost city” (2003: 17): a city convulsed by strikes and protests, and whose residents had begun to leave in droves.
“Hopelessness,” argued Ernest Bloch (1986: 5), “is itself in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs.” In describing the hopelessness that affected the Genoa of the early 1980s, Genoese novelist Maurizio Maggiani (2007: 84) wrote:
I know that Genoa has been a city scattered with shattered mirrors. I remember them, the 1980s…. People walked in the streets with their heads hanging low, and they did not even feel like looking at themselves in the shop windows; it was a city of dirty glasses. Every millenarian city has had its plague, caught its infections. Sometimes it even dies of it. Genoa’s latest plague was the disease of the iron. It had spread to the steel and had turned it into rusty mounds. The rust had spread and had smeared the whole city; people were leaving just like the exodus. The rust melted into the sea and started corrupting the port, and soon enough everything was falling apart. The plague comes when you need to purge your sins, Genoa’s sin was the lethal sin of simplification.
The hopelessness that spread among the youth of the 1970s, inciting drug use and political violence, was in the first place the index of a larger crisis that affected Italian society as a whole (Ginsborg 1990), and Genoa more than other cities. The energy crisis of 1973 had delivered the first shock to Genoa’s industries: the state-subsidized steelworks, the shipyards and the electromechanical sector that were increasingly struggling to compete in international markets even as they kept barely afloat at the national level (Arvati 1988). Genoa’s single-handed investment in statalized heavy industries (its “sin of simplification”) was backfiring. A decade later, the magnitude of the crisis was crushing the Genoese economy. The Ansaldo industrial conglomerate was languishing; the containerization of Genoa’s port had made docks and workers redundant (Hillman 2008); Genoa’s shipyards were suffering from the global demise of transatlantic passenger ships; and its steelworks were unable to keep up with the mounting foreign competition (Arvati 1988: 60–61). The negative trend seemed to have no end in sight. As jobs in traditionally masculine working-class sectors were on the wane (Arvati 1988; 1994), Genoese workers’ struggles began displaying a peculiarly muscular feel.
Dissatisfied with the way their unions were conducting the negotiations, in 1980 Genoese steel and port workers began taking their grievances out of the factory and directly to the streets, with the intent of gaining the greatest visibility possible by disrupting the urban everyday. The sight of cortei (protest marches) slowly striding down Genoa’s main thoroughfares with the explicit intent to bring traffic to a halt became a familiar one. Genoa’s residents had to resign themselves to being stopped in their tracks when workers took to the streets. This trend intensified in January 1983, when street blockades evolved into the full-fledged occupation of one of Genoa’s main railway stations, as well as its highway accesses, the airport, and the junction (sopraelevata) that connects downtown Genoa to its industrial peripheries, thus forcefully bringing the whole city to a chaotic standstill (Arvati 1988: 100).
Many middle-aged Genoese still remember the sight of the gigantic—and excruciatingly slow—machines that, operated by port workers, would irrupt into downtown Genoa. Carousing around its nineteenth-century piazzas, these mechanical giants would intentionally disrupt traffic, thus creating some of the worst congestions ever. What we were witnessing was a new type of strike: one that had moved out of factories and workplaces to claim the whole city as its arena. The old pattern in which workers stopped or slowed production to air their grievances to their employers had morphed into a type of protest in which causing discomfort to the citizenry as a whole became instrumental in forcing local and state-level politicians to intervene for the sake of preserving their own electoral bases (Pipan 1989). This tactic triggered ambivalent responses in those who were not directly affected by the layoffs. On one hand, many sympathized with the workers who were at risk of losing their livelihood for good. The centrality to Genoa’s economy of the electromechanical sector as well as the shipyards and the steelworks also caused concerns about the future of the city as a whole. On the other hand, the workers’ explicit intent to maximize the discomfort to the collectivity alienated many potential supporters by feeding into the old mythology of the “divided city” as well as the more recent representation of blue-collar workers as entitled, if anachronistic, bullies.5
Describing the society of the late 1950s, sociologist Cavalli (1960) had characterized Genoa as a divided city whose left-wing working classes residing in the western peripheries were “arroccati” (entrenched)—that is, refused any contact with the rest of society, a sizable portion of which was suffused with an exquisitely Catholic fear of communists. In the 1980s, the mythology of the divided city was deftly utilized by politicians keen on casting the workers’ movements as fossilized and unrealistic (Arvati 1988: 101). The popularity of such stereotype ended up preventing the dialogue and exacerbating the conflict between the workers who sought to defend their employment on the one hand, and the politicians and entrepreneurs who supported “modernization” agendas entailing the privatization and the reorganization of what had been largely state-run industrial sectors on the other hand. According to those who pushed for “progress,” workers were guilty of continuismo (Arvati 1988: 101): the inability to embrace inevitable change and to proactively adapt to new circumstances by accepting the much touted Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no alternative” to privatization and deindustrialization (Harvey 2000: 17). This narrative blamed the locally hegemonic Left for its unwillingness to shed the ailing state-subsidized industrial economy while embracing the “new”: private ownership with its corollary of reorganization and downsizing. Indelibly etched in this chapter of Genoese history is former Socialist mayor Fulvio Cerofolini’s 1984 refusal to allow Euro Disney to build a theme park in Genoa: “This is not a city of waiters,” he notoriously said, voicing a proud workerist stance that synthetized the legitimate suspicion that the shift from industrial to service sector employment would hardly serve the interests of workers. Yet, to those who did not support his political views (mostly the private sector), this stance epitomized all that was wrong with a city that refused to move on. Three decades later, Cerofolini’s sentence still haunts the collective memory of a largely deindustrialized Genoa that had to struggle to establish itself as a tourist destination.
Hope Is Elsewhere
While 1983 was the peak of the crisis, for much of Northern Italy the rebound was right around the corner (Ginsborg 2003: 32). By 1984, the Italian economy was already faring considerably better (Ginsborg 1990: 406–407). The restructuring and downsizing of Italy’s main companies had increased profits, the stock market was on the rise, and the widely publicized new wave of young managers such as Raoul Gardini, Silvio Berlusconi, Carlo de Benedetti, and Luciano Benetton seemed to demonstrate that social mobility was, at long last, a possibility (Ginsborg 1990: 408). The neoliberal mythology of self-reliance (Ong 2006) made its appearance in a static society in which professions had often been (and continue to be) handed down from generation to generation (Guano 2010b; Yanagisako 2013; Zinn 2001). While Genoa’s blue-collar workers were increasingly deprived of their hope, the educated middle classes saw neoliberal tropes of meritocracy and initiative (Ong 2006), along with the corollary of hedonism seeping in from the North Atlantic, as seemingly offering an alluringly modern alternative to all that had been wrong with Genoese society up to that point. This included complete reliance on the state, bureaucratism, aversion to change, the hegemony of political parties in all decision-making processes, and the cronyism, nepotism, and clientelism that had traditionally controlled the allocation of jobs and resources in a bloated public sector. In the private sector, thus went the rhetoric, initiative and talent were all that counted, and from then on the private sector had to be incentivized and privileged.
In order to better understand the success of this kind of right-wing utopia (Buck-Morss 2002; Harvey 2000) among young Italians of that time, it bears mentioning that the social upheavals of the late 1960s had brought about a profound transformation in the class politics of education—a transformation that was soon to be met with a decrease in the social value of recently democratized types of knowledge. Before then, working-class students had been encouraged to either leave school early or attend vocational institutes where they would learn a trade. Middle- and working-class women could at best expect to obtain some training to become elementary school teachers; lower- to middle-class men often attended professional schools where they acquired the skills they needed to become clerks (Barbagli 1969, 1974). Starting with the 1970s, however, more and more children of working-class and lower-middle-class families had begun pursuing college degrees, thus making inroads into a formerly bourgeois domain. They had several motivations. By then, access to sought-after stable employment in statalized industries and the public administration required a degree (Palumbo 1994: 937). Furthermore, the high unemployment rates among younger generations in a society where all occupational venues were taken by middle-aged men had also turned schools into outlets where the youth bode their time as they waited for opportunities to materialize (Palumbo 1994: 931). Unfortunately, as it often happens, the heightened hopes for social mobility brought about by increased educational achievements were to result in even bitterer disappointments (Mains 2012).
In spite of their degrees, many first-generation college graduates were still faced with a grim job market where all that mattered was a powerful patron’s raccomandazione (intercession; see Zinn 2001). The latter would be issued in return for favors such as a sizable pool of electoral votes to be gathered among friends and family (Ferrera 1996), or, as happened to some of my friends, several months’ worth of one’s salary. It bears mentioning that, while widespread all over the country, in Genoa the practice of patronage was particularly acute due to how the local oligarchy had been exerting its hegemony even after Italy’s unification. Local powerful families had traditionally wielded their financial prowess, their political clout, and their social prestige while controlling the city’s political and economic life through cronyism and nepotism (Garibbo 2000: 306). This dynamic was further exacerbated by the prevalence of statalized employment both in the public administration and in the local industries, which had been colonized by political parties and their clientelistic logics. In a city where influence peddling was—and continues to be—the name of the game, whom you knew and what you were willing to do for them was considerably more important than any skills you could list on your resume.6 Aside from stifling the hopes and thwarting the efforts of all those who could not count on a powerful patron, the practice of patronage promoted a self-referential managerial and administrative culture that was often criticized for valuing political networking more than professionalism and productivity, and for serving exclusively the interests of a rentier elite that was, and continues to be, averse to innovation and risk-taking (Castelli and Gozzi 1994; Palumbo 1994).
In the face of Genoa’s dearth of opportunities, the neoliberal rhetoric of meritocracy that was being drilled into young students fostered a new type of hope: one that was steeped in the promise that, for the best and the brightest among them, the feudal immobility of yore would soon give way to a new world of opportunities (Signorelli 1990). Meritocracy may as well be, as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron posited, a sham cast over the reproduction of privilege (1990); however, for generations of young Italians whom clientelism and nepotism had consistently barred from all professional outlets, meritocracy represented a break from social immobility as well as a hope for a “modern” future where all would have the same chances: the hope for fairness in the competition for securing jobs and resources had replaced the dream of social justice.7
By comparison with the intense political activism of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Italian 1980s have been defined as an “age of [political] disenchantment” (Palumbo 1994: 984). Growing up in the shadow of the right- and left-wing terrorism and the violence that had tormented Italy for a whole decade, the youth of the 1980s increasingly associated the political activism of their teenage years with a stage in their life that, amounting to juvenile rebelliousness, had to be outgrown. On the other hand, people born in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s were also increasingly sensitive to the lure of the hedonism that had begun to seep into the country along with Thatcherite ideas about individualism and “freedom,” and that was honed through the unprecedented proliferation of private television channels, several of which were owned by Silvio Berlusconi. Diverging from the predominantly educational purposes of Italy’s public broadcasting stations and its Catholic mores, Berlusconi’s television channels began to offer shows dominated by the crude objectification of women’s bodies, by the display of unbridled wealth, and by an ethos of social ascent modeled after the American Dream (Ginsborg 2003). This was the model that Berlusconi himself sought to emulate as, in the early 1990s, he began positing himself as a “self-made man” who legitimized his claim to political power with his financial successes and his aversion to traditional politics (Ginsborg 2003). The spirit of the times was such that many young women in my generation hung up their hippie garbs and began donning stiletto heels as they made a beeline for the disco. Weekends were no longer devoted to political activism, but rather to going to the Riviera, in an increasingly collective hedonist frenzy that, weekend after weekend, trapped thousands of cars in endless traffic jams on their way to and from the beach. Internal tourism experienced a steep increase, too, and family vacations and school field trips were often devoted to visiting Italy’s cities of art: Rome, Florence, and Venice. Although nearby Portofino and the Cinque Terre already enjoyed international visibility, at that time Genoa was not part of any tourist circuit worth mentioning.
Many hopeful young Italians were eager to break out of the mold of what they now regarded as sterile juvenile political rebelliousness by means of hard work and ambition, but societal change had been only skin-deep. The old privileges of the social, financial, and political elites—or what, in the parlance of the early 2000s, were to be defined as Italy’s “castes”—remained largely untouched, and the eagerness of the new generations was to make the encounter with reality all the more disappointing. Even the upheavals of the late 1960s and the 1970s had done little to equalize the playing field of Italian society and prepare it for the meritocracy, the entrepreneurship, and the openness to change that were allegedly fundamental to the much-touted “new economy.”
To make things worse, even though the economic climate in the rest of Northern Italy looked encouraging enough as to make younger generations hope for a brighter future, Genoa’s decline seemed unstoppable. While Genoa’s public industrial sector shrank considerably, large-scale private initiatives meant to boost the economy lagged behind. Blaming what they regarded as the entitlements and the combativeness of local workers, the local financial elites preferred to invest elsewhere or not to invest at all; as a result, unemployment rates remained higher than in the rest of the North, thus earning Genoa the title of “meridione del nord” (the underdeveloped South of Italy’s developed North). Even as they were spurred to compete and be ready to claim their place in the sun, the generations of the late 1960s and the 1970s were implicitly being trained to become part of a large population of unemployed or underemployed but highly educated Genoese: an “intellectual capital” to whom a city focused on mourning the demise of its industrial sector had nothing to offer (Arvati 1988: 17). With few employment outlets other than the public administration or a rapidly shrinking school system, Genoa’s intellectual capital languished. Many of the young and the hopeful left Genoa to make a living elsewhere—usually Milan, the thriving postindustrial metropolis that epitomized Italian modernity (Foot 2001). Those who stayed behind may have found ways to earn a living; however, this almost invariably entailed giving up some of their dreams: for many, this meant renouncing professional ambitions, settling for a lifetime of underemployment, postponing—or even renouncing—marriage and parenthood and keeping fertility rates well below replacement (Arvati n.d., 1994; Palumbo 1994).8 While in 1971 Genoa had a population of well over 800,000, by 2001 it had dropped to 600,000.9 I was one of those who left in the early 1990s, defeated by a lack of opportunities that translated as lack of hope.
The Rise of Affective Urbanism
The Genoa of the 1980s, wrote Maggiani, was a city of shattered mirrors. Another famous local novelist, Antonio Tabucchi, wrote about the “diffuse agony” of its centro storico as a “slow leprosy that has invaded walls and houses and whose rot is devious and unstoppable, like a sentence. The garbage collectors come by only rarely, like anyone else they also disdain the detritus of this lower humankind. At night, syringes sparkle in the vicoli, and so do plastic bags, along with the undecipherable mass of some rats that died in a corner where a phosphorescent pest control banner warns not to touch the poisonous copper green baits scattered on the pavement” (Tabucchi 1986: 11). As evinced from the renewal, regeneration, and gentrification processes ignited in the late twentieth century in postindustrial cities worldwide, this level of degradation in a strategically situated neighborhood had the potential to be palatable to investors. Soon enough this waste land shifted, in the words of local city assessor Bruno Gabrielli (1999), from being regarded as a “burden” to becoming an “opportunity.” Even though in 1984 Mayor Cerofolini still thought that Genoa was not a city of waiters, the left-wing administrations’ opposition to developing a tourist industry in Genoa did not last long. After all, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall had caused a profound identity crisis in the Italian Left (Kertzer 1998), which, ever since, had become increasingly sensitive to the lures of neoliberalism (Dines 2012).
All over Europe, administrations in cahoots with local elites were launching renewal projects that, while advertised as revitalization strategies, were, in fact, meant to bolster revenues for developers allied with the local political classes (Swyngedow, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002). Such transformations often took place through the organization of great events that bring in large amounts of governmental funding, and contributed to considerable interventions on the cityscapes (Mastropiero 2007). In Genoa, too, the conversion to cultural tourism unfolded through the organization of a series of great events—the Exposition of 1992; the Group of Eight summit of 2001, and Genoa’s role as a Capital of European Culture in 2004—meant to showcase the city internationally.10 As elsewhere, the transformation was presented to the residents as a positive impulse to the lagging economy (Swyngedow, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002); as elsewhere, it was welcomed by a citizenry that, tired of shattered mirrors, eagerly awaited a chance for change.
Just as in other postindustrial European cities, in Genoa hope started to materialize under the pressure of a new affective urbanism (Anderson and Holden 2008) whereby the planning of great events of international scope extensively used the media to build consensus and promote the vision of a bright urban future (Dines 2012: 42). Promoting hope as “infrastructural to urban change” (Anderson and Holden 2008: 144), affective urbanism flashes promises of “poverty alleviation, employment, better consumption practices (of images, experience), an improved material infrastructure of everyday life (environment, transport, etc.), and fewer ‘incivilities’ (liter, ‘antisocial behavior’)” (Anderson and Holden 2008: 152). Painting a utopian veneer of salvific promises (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) onto a considerably grimmer reality, great events funnel considerable amount of local, national, and EU funding into creating a new, visitable urbanscape (Dicks 2004) that caters to tourists as well as locals. This is what happened in Genoa, too. Yet the pursuit of great events was hardly the only strategy in Genoa’s revitalization.
In 1986, Genoa’s city administration along with the port consortium and the urban planning department of the Liguria region put forth a strategic plan that sought to stop Genoa’s decline by valorizing its centro storico and by converting its industrial areas to shopping centers (Hillman 2008: 306). The city administration elicited architectural proposals for the purpose of giving Genoa’s old port a complete makeover in preparation for the Expo (Exposition) of 1992 with which Genoa celebrated Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World—its “discovery,” as Italians unencumbered by extra-European perspectives liked to call it. The Italian government had committed 295 billion lire worth of funds for the project (Mastropiero 2007: 176). Among these proposals, a few stood out. American architect John Portman designed a 262-meter-tall tower built on an artificial island at the center of the old port. The tower would host restaurants and a gigantic hotel; built in its vicinity, an underwater aquarium would help attract visitors. The project was to be complemented by a “sfoltimento” (thinning out) of the centro storico: a selective destruction of buildings meant to provide the remaining ones with the space and the light they would need for a consistent property appreciation. Not only did many find serious flaws with the sfoltimento project, but Portman’s plan triggered heated debates, too, and was eventually discarded due to the concern that his artificial island would deface what had been the core of Genoa’s original port. Eventually, the bid was won by Renzo Piano, a Genoese architect of international renown who designed and saw to completion the waterfront now known as Porto Antico (Ancient Port). Installed on the premises of Genoa’s earliest port, Porto Antico became a highly successful marina with a globalized feel endowed with restaurants, cinemas, museums, shops, a public library, a swimming pool, an outdoor theater, a panoramic elevator, a state-of-the-art aquarium, shopping facilities, and a large esplanade, later to be complemented by a swath of luxury housing units. In spite of all these efforts, however, the Exposition of 1992 was not a success. It failed to attract the international attention that the Genoese administration was hoping to elicit; the number of visitors was lower than expected, and so were the revenues it generated.
Overall, for much of Northern Italy the 1980s had been the years of the boom; the 1990s, instead, were marked by a contraction of the economy caused by a lack of planning at the hands of Italy’s political and economic elites (Ginsborg 2003). The “years of lead” were over; yet the mafia assassinations of two prominent magistrates in Sicily and the bombings of historical and artistic sites in Rome, Florence, and Milan for the sake of bullying the state into submission periodically reminded Italy’s publics that peace and stability were still a long way off.11 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had eased the Cold War tension that had been particularly high in Italy, and the proclamation of the victory of Western capitalism had precipitated the identity crisis of the Italian Left (Kertzer 1998). Soon enough, however, Italy’s other main parties ended up in a sea of troubles, too: the 1992 eruption of the tangentopoli (bribesville) corruption scandals led to the demise of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and the Socialist Party. For many, the political turmoil of the early 1990s raised hopes that the spoils system and the clientelistic infiltration of partitocrazia (partycracy) into all sectors of Italian society (Della Porta and Vannucci 1999) would finally come to an end. The dream of impending modernization was further intensified by the rise of the European Union, which in turn fed the hope that Italy was on its way to obtaining more nimble, transparent, and efficient state administration modeled after its North European counterparts (Koenig-Archibugi 2003). As Italians were to find out soon, none of these predictions was accurate: the parties that came down crumbling after the tangentopoli shakeup were promptly replaced by new—and possibly even more corrupt—ones, and, instead of simplifying Italy’s abstruse bureaucracy, the European Union added new, and equally repressive, layers of red tape to people’s everyday life.
For Genoa, the 1990s meant a further deterioration of its industrial sectors. Even though over the previous decade employment rates all over Northern Italy had increased by 10.6 percent, in Genoa they kept declining. By 1992, 13 percent of its population was unemployed (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 890–894)—a number that did not take into account those who had surrendered to a “culture of resignation” (Palumbo 1994: 958) and were no longer even looking for a job. Yet Genoa as a whole did not give in to collective trauma (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 885). In spite of all odds, for many a Genoese the 1990s were still characterized by a cautious optimism driven primarily by the affective impact of urban revitalization and the promise of a new and thriving postindustrial city.
As Ernest Bloch (1986: 10) observed, “The gulf between dream and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his dream…. There only has to be some point of contact between dream and life for everything to be in the best order.” For one, the dreams of many a Genoese were kindled by the promise of transforming Genoa into an all-Italian Silicon Valley (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 995): a promise that pivoted on the creation of a science and technology park on the Erzelli hill where the local School of Engineering would spearhead the push for scientific research, technological innovation, and employment.12 On a more immediate level—one that touched the everyday lives of many—change was under way in the cityscape itself: moving the School of Architecture to the centro storico brought new life to a formerly degraded and sparsely populated neighborhood. The thirteenth-century Palazzo Ducale, which had formerly been closed off to the general public and utilized for much of the twentieth century as a court, was restored to its original beauty and began hosting high-profile exhibitions that considerably increased Genoa’s visibility and the number of visitors, thus generating revenues for local businesses. In discussing the spatial dimensions of neoliberal hope, David Harvey (2000: 181) pointed out how this entails the creation of a built environment meant to host commercial activities. This is certainly what happened in Genoa’s centro storico—though on a considerably smaller scale than the corporate one surmised by Harvey. The municipal support (in the form of subsidized loans) for small businesses in the centro storico provided the “point of contact” between the dreamers’ hope for a stable livelihood and a strategy meant to bring about a hike in property prices and tax revenues. Yet the proliferation of small businesses also contributed to somewhat alleviating this city’s traditionally high unemployment rates, thus fostering hope that change was, after all, possible.
The attitudes of many a Genoese shifted, too, and the urban everyday gained back much of the sociability that had been disrupted in previous decades—with an added layer of hedonism fostered by the revitalization. All over the city, coffee shops installed dehors (small patios) on their premises, thus encouraging the habit of sitting outdoors while socializing over a cup of coffee. The aperitivo ritual became a common practice, and at 6 PM coffee shops and bars would start filling up with people sipping cocktails and sampling appetizers. In the mid-1990s, the first mercatini dell’antiquariato (street antique fairs) made their appearance in the courtyard of Palazzo Ducale, in the stylish nineteenth-century arcade known as Galleria Mazzini, and in the very central Via Cesarea, thus offering people a low-investment, low-cost opportunity to make a living even as they reinforced Genoa’s halo as a city of culture. Rather than reducing the city to a consumable simulacrum, however, several of the transformations occurring under the auspices of Genoa’s revitalization increased the symbolic sustenance and meaningfulness that residents already drew from the spaces of their everyday life (Low 2000: 244). Overall, many Genoese were increasingly pleased with the changes that were taking place in their city, even as they kept hoping for more—more opportunities for work along with more opportunities for enjoying a city that they had long experienced as bleak, dangerous, and degraded. This hope was in line with the ethos of the time. The hedonistic education of the 1980s that had resulted from a mix of North Atlantic ideology on one hand and the very much local relief at the end of the terrorist era on the other had matured into the desire to consume “culture” as a blend of sensuous pleasures conveyed through the beauty of architectural and natural landscapes, the folklore of artisan production and petty commerce, a range of assorted public, free, and widely accessible urban activities ranging from street theater to concerts, from symposia to dance performances and museum events, and the ever-present pleasures of people-watching. Not only was the new Genoa more democratically enjoyable, but it was also seemingly poised for a long overdue economic renaissance as a tourist city.
With its partially renewed centro storico, the new waterfront, and the extremely popular exhibitions hosted in the newly restored Palazzo Ducale, the Genoa of the 1990s had already showed signs of change. More was on the horizon, though—namely, Genoa’s role as the host of the Group of Eight summit of 2001 and its one-year tenure as European Cultural Capital in 2004. Massive injections of funds from the national government and the European Union subsidized the makeover of various areas of downtown Genoa. For a long time, much of the city was wrapped in scaffoldings. As one woman put it, “It’s almost as if the city were pregnant. We [the Genoese] know it’s going to take a while, and we are waiting to see what’s going to be birthed.” In a city whose residents are notorious for their pessimism, the late 1990s and the early 2000s were years of rising expectations and cautious optimism. For a while, even the most jaded Genoese held their breath and suspended judgment. The excitement of discovering what was to emerge from the construction sites is once again well captured by writer Maggiani:
Once the sin has been amended, the plague vanishes, the infections dry out and slowly heal. People go back to looking for a clean glass where to take a peek at themselves. I remember one day that could be memorialized as the morning of the mirrors. The morning when the canopy covers were torn down, the day after the San Lorenzo area was opened up to the city at the end of the restorations. After the years of the infection, [Genoa] had begun to clean the rot off. It had even found a way to project splendors. It was erecting constructions sites to incubate wonders worthy of glossy bilingual magazines. Yet, for the longest time the city continued to look askance at itself. It sought out its reflected image with the corner of the eye. Each time, one piece or the other was missing for it to be able to find itself whole, just like it had always been even in times of plenty. And something was found on that San Lorenzo morning…. That morning, the whole city was mirroring itself in San Lorenzo, the whole city had its nose turned up and was going “ah” and “oh.” This was the city of those who were going to the post office, of those who needed to go buy some fish, of those who had gone out to get a cup of coffee, of those who wanted to get a new job or just find any job—all those who, for years, had walked through San Lorenzo with their head hanging, trying to avoid the traffic and seeking shelter in the shade of the dust clouds and the scaffoldings. And you could see that people were happy to love San Lorenzo, and everybody could see that San Lorenzo had started loving the city again. And that was something. (Maggiani 2007: 85)
What Maggiani describes as a renewed love affair between San Lorenzo and the Genoese only begins to highlight the importance of public space in Italian sociality, whereby a vibrant street life has long been part and parcel of everyday life in the city (Del Negro 2004; Moretti 2015). There is no question about the role of ornate corridor streets as markers of elitism that set the tone for an urban theater conducive to classist representations of selves and others (Holston 1989). On the other hand, the relative publicness of such streets allows for a sociability and an enjoyment of the urban outdoors that is open to a broad range of activities: not just idle strolling and hanging out, window shopping and seeing and being seen (Del Negro 2004), but also petty commerce, theater and art, panhandling, religious and folkloric celebrations, political rallies and protests—to name a few. Genoa’s San Lorenzo area is a case in point. For the longest time, Via San Lorenzo—the street that connects Palazzo Ducale to Genoa’s gothic cathedral and the waterfront—had been congested with loud traffic and smeared with smog. Pedestrians had no choice but to negotiate the narrow sidewalks with parked cars and scooters even as they filled their lungs with exhaust gases. Once the renovation was completed in 2001, the newly pedestrianized Via San Lorenzo became a haven for a plurality of practices at the hands of locals (a category which includes both Genoese and immigrants) as well as visitors.
On most days, the street hosts an intense foot traffic; some passersby walk purposefully, seemingly intent on reaching a specific destination. Others, instead, wander aimlessly, taking it all in. Part of the street is lined up with coffee shops and small stores selling antiques, books, prints and posters, ice cream, regional specialty foods, South Asian exotica, herbal preparations, pastry, eyeglasses, and cheap Chinese apparel. A smattering of peddlers sell hand-made jewelry, crafts, and paintings from booths lined up against the side of the San Lorenzo cathedral; street musicians perform for passersby, and, on the first weekend of every month, the flea and antique market hosted in the Palazzo Ducale spills into the San Lorenzo area, adding additional fodder for the visual and tactile pleasures of passersby. The steps of the magnificent gothic cathedral provide popular accommodation for tourists and locals alike, who often share them—though not without discomfort—with the punkabbestia: anarchist-inspired homeless youth who have selected this area as a hangout for themselves and their large-breed dogs. Gypsy women and small groups of children blend in with the crowd, panhandling visitors. The social life of San Lorenzo is punctuated by grand public events, too. One of these is the yearly historical parade of San Giovanni Battista, during which the local Cardinal walks the ornate sixteenth-century silver arc containing the local patron saint’s ashes all the way to the waterfront to bless the sea as the city’s traditional source of livelihood. A highly spectacular event that has been held for centuries for the sake of fostering vertical solidarity and instilling both local pride and pious sentiments in the populace (Garibbo 2000: 67), the procession features medieval and Renaissance costumes as well as the portacristi: members of Catholic confraternities who carry large and extremely heavy ancient crosses decorated with a profusion of silver leaves. Yet Via San Lorenzo is also an occasional route for protesters, who saturate it with their chants, their whistles, and their banners as they march from one end to the other to ensure an adequate outreach to their grievances. Overall, many of Genoa’s renovated and largely pedestrianized downtown areas do not cater exclusively to middle- to upper-class individuals keen on consuming the city (Zukin 1996). Instead, they provide a vibrant arena that condenses the three historically predominant forms of the Italian piazza—the religious plaza, the political space, and the market place (Isnenghi 2004, in Dines 2012: 108)—to accommodate a plethora of urban publics (Gazzola 2013).
Figure 3. Catholic procession in San Lorenzo. Photo by author.
GeNova—The New Genoa
In the years that immediately preceded the Group of Eight summit of 2001, Genoa’s downtown underwent large-scale renovations meant to valorize its historical heritage and increase its visitability; for many Genoese, this meant an opportunity to start small businesses that would earn them a living in the face of consistently high unemployment rates. Their hopes, however, were to be met only partially. The G8 summit, to which I devote a chapter in this book, turned its promise of showcasing the new Genoa to international audiences into a globally visible display of state repression. Shocked by what had happened under their eyes, many a Genoese resented how their city had been hijacked from them by a political performance, reduced to a battlefield, and then memorialized as nothing else but a dramatic event. Yet even in the aftermath of this disaster, many Genoese still had something to be hopeful for: namely the promise that, upon becoming Capital of European Culture for all of 2004, Genoa would conquer its own place in the sun as part of Italy’s profitable tourist circuit. Even the 7.5 percent demographic increment reported between 2001 and 2005 pointed to an increased confidence among this city’s residents, many of whom, instead of migrating, stayed on and started families (Arvati n.d.: 29).
The year 2004 was a special time for many Genoese, whose legendary propensity toward pessimism and despondency was, yet again, replaced by hopefulness. As indicated by its GeNova (New Genoa) logo, the city that welcomed visitors that year had changed remarkably. A considerable injection of national and EU funds helped establish a beautified cityscape that hosted a wide assortment of festivals, symposia, events, and exhibitions on topics ranging from ancient history to modernity, from art to folklore, from science and technology to industry, and from migrations to sports. By the summer of 2004, tourist flows had grown considerably; the number of museum visitors had increased from 163,000 in 1999 to 410,000 (Hillman 2008: 312), and at all times of the day groups of visitors could be spotted striding through Genoa’s downtown, its centro storico, and the Porto Antico. Revenues for local businesses went up, and the excitement among the residents was palpable. More than once, while wandering about in areas of the centro storico that had previously been off the beaten track, I was stopped by elderly residents who, taking me for a tourist, proudly volunteered directions to freshly renovated historical landmarks. Some of these were in the very same area where, in the late 1970s, locals had pelted my schoolmates with stones during an art history field trip.
While the success of Genoa’s tenure as Capital of European Culture had many hope for the best, the hardship was not over. The following year, Genoa experienced a sharp decline in tourist presences and revenues; with no great event in sight, hope dwindled. Many started wondering if anything would ever change after all. In 2002 the introduction of the Euro, the unified European currency, had brought about a 100 percent price hike that took place almost overnight: due to speculations that went unchecked, all of a sudden what had previously cost 1,000 lire was worth one euro—that is, about 2,000 lire. Unfortunately, salaries, pensions, and savings remained unchanged. If the maneuver reduced Italy’s public debt by half, it also delivered a formidable blow to the financial stability and the well-being of Italy’s middle and working classes. To make things worse, the financial crisis that had begun in the United States in 2008 soon spread to Italy; this country’s large public debt, its lack of growth, and the limited credibility of its government turned the crisis into a full-fledged recession that affected already vulnerable Genoa even more than other Northern cities. For years, ever since the onset of the recession, hardly a week went by without a protest taking place in downtown Genoa. In 2011, massive layoffs were announced by Fincantieri, Genoa’s foremost shipyard. Months of convulsive street protests ensued, during which workers placed a large excavator in front of the prefecture with the implicit threat they would launch it against the sixteenth-century building if their grievances were not to be heard. In 2013, employees of the local public transportation company went on a five-day strike against the privatization of their firm, thus bringing the whole city to a standstill. In the meantime, the escalation of property taxes (IMU) meant to help stem the public debt brought about a steep increase in rents for already struggling small business owners, estimated in the range of 70.1 percent for centro storico properties and 48.1 percent for the rest of the city.13 Combined with the difficulty in obtaining credit and the collapse of consumer spending at the hands of a citizenry bogged down by high unemployment rates, low salaries, and record high taxation (Guano 2010a), these rent hikes caused many a small business to close, thus contributing to the impoverishment of a large section of the local middle class that had been a protagonist of Genoa’s hopefulness.
The Uneven Distribution of Hope
Keen on escaping their predicament through strategies that ranged from installing a tiny dehors in front of one’s hole-in-the-wall coffee shop to taking advantage of a municipality’s subsidized loans by opening a small business for selling one’s own handmade crafts, local small business owners had contributed with their poiesis to making the city from the bottom up (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013: 197). Indeed, the promise of progress and the capitalist mobilization of hope brought about by affective urbanism (Anderson and Fenton 2008; Lashaw 2008) may, under certain circumstances, foster the rise of creative classes (Florida 2012 [2002]) endowed at the very least with cultural and social capital; however, processes of urban revitalization also bring about a deepening of existing inequalities. This happened in Genoa, too.
If, for segments of the educated middle classes, Genoa’s revitalization seemed to prospect opportunities for employment and above all small-scale entrepreneurship, the hope fostered by affective capitalist urbanism was not evenly distributed—nor were its dividends (Anderson and Holden 2008; Appadurai 2013; Miyazaki 2013). Among those who did not expect to garner benefits were the residents of much of the industrial peripheries to the west of the city: those neighborhoods that had been disproportionately affected by industrial degradation, and that did not directly benefit from an increase in tourist flows (Hillman 2008) even as the local factories kept hemorraging jobs. Take, for example, Sampierdarena.
A former seaside village situated to the west of Genoa’s dowtown and a favorite resort with local and international bourgeoisies, Sampierdarena was stripped of its beaches, its pleasantness, and its prestige in the early twentieth century due to the expansion of Genoa’s port. After turning into a working- to lower-middle-class neighborhood, in the mid-1990s Sampierdarena went on to become the destination of a massive immigration from Ecuador. As the Ecuadorian community became the largest immigrant group in Genoa, tensions began between the newcomers and the Genoese residents. Nowadays, some of the most frequently voiced complaints about Sampierdarena are the neighborhood’s rise in crime rates and the difficulties in syncronizing the schedules and habits of the (mostly aging) Italian residents with those of the considerably younger Latin American community. Within apartment complexes, for example, squabbles among neighbors frequently arise around the issue of noise levels that the Genoese are not willing to tolerate. Public space is just as contested: on one hand, Genoese residents complain about the street parties and the brawls that erupt at night, often leaving behind carpets of broken beer bottles (Gazzola, Prampolini, and Rimondo 2014: 120); on the other hand, Ecuadorian youth deprecate the scarcity of public spaces where to get together, play soccer, listen to music, and party without incurring the grievances of Italians (Flores and Valencia León 2007). However, what singlehandedly triggers the most anxieties among the Genoese is the presence of pandillas: gangs of Latino youth such as the Latin Kings or the Netas who, unlike less sensational facets of Ecuadorian immigrants’ life, receive considerable attention at the hands of the local media (Queirolo Palmas 2005).14
