Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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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).