In the 1960s, with a rise in blue- and white-collar employment rates as well as in consumption standards, more and more Genoese became eager to participate in the formerly aristocratic ritual of the urban stroll during which they would perform their proper personas while enjoying the sensory, social, cultural, and commercial stimuli provided by fellow passersby, the cityscape, and local businesses. Strolling practices were established that are still popular today. During the warm season, the seaside promenades of bourgeois Corso Italia and Nervi began to brim with smartly dressed crowds enjoying the view and the sea breeze as well as the sight of their fellow Genoese while eating gelato or sipping a soda. In fall and winter, much of the passeggiata practice was—and still is—conducted downtown, especially in the very central (and conveniently porched) Via Venti Settembre, where the windows of some of the city’s trendiest stores provide additional entertainment, and the coffee shops delight the crowds with the aromas of espresso and fresh pastry. Lurking under the porches like paparazzi in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita, in those years professional photographers used to take flattering shots of passersby who would then purchase the photos as mementos of their apt urbanity. Local slang emerged defining the passeggiata as fare le vasche—literally, to “do laps” by walking back and forth from one end of the street to the other—as well as fare lo struscio, “to do the rub,” a phrase that hints at the sensuous experience of bodies fleetingly feeling each other in a casual mutual acknowledgment. The popularity of this practice went along with the rapid tertiarization of Genoa’s workforce and the rise of its middle class.
Figure 1. Passeggiata in downtown Genoa, circa 1962. Photo by Cineclair.
Deindustrialization and the Rise of a New Sensibility
Tastefully clad and equipped with a newly found knack for proper forms of consumption as well as, in most cases, a working knowledge of high culture, in the 1960s Genoa’s middle classes were poised to enjoy their city the way local elites had done before them. Yet the arena where they could see and be seen even as they pursued their urban pleasures was somewhat sketchy. Their sensuous fruition of their city was limited on one hand by the lingering ravages of World War II bombardments and a considerably degraded centro storico, and on the other by the prioritization of industrial production and the modernist rationalization of urban space (Avila 2014; Lefebvre 1978) that had been conducted for much of the twentieth century at the expense of residents’ needs and their quality of life (Gazzola, Prampolini, and Rimondi 2014). As Genoa’s mechanical industries, its port, and its steelworks continued to expand, forms of pollution emerged that ranged from toxic fumes and sludge to coal dust and airborne particulates. Yet, while its nefarious effects were naturalized as an inevitable part of life in a modern city (Mirzoeff 2014), the distribution of industrial discomfort was hardly class-blind. Most of the problems caused by Genoa’s metropolitan expansion and its industrialization were concentrated in the working-class peripheries. While bourgeois Albaro and Castelletto remained pristine, the city’s western outskirts were forced to host the factories, the port, the airport, the city’s garbage dump, and a highway—Genoa’s first—built right between rows of apartment complexes. The destructive effects of Genoa’s modernization extended to its downtown, too—though there they only affected the historic center that had been progressively abandoned since the nineteenth century. In the 1950s, a first swath of the centro storico had been bulldozed to give way to Piccapietra, a commercial and administrative district. In 1965, an unsightly junction known as sopraelevata was installed between Genoa’s historic center and the port, thus finalizing the disconnection between this sparsely populated working-class neighborhood and an already barely visible sea. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the area of the centro storico known as Via Madre di Dio was razed to the ground and replaced with a modernist conglomerate of office buildings known as Centro dei Liguri. Immediately populated by pushers and heroin addicts, the adjacent park was dubbed “Giardini di plastica” (Plastic Gardens) and proactively avoided by everybody else. The early 1970s was also a negative turning point for Genoa: the steep decline of its port as well as its steelworks and mechanical industries ensuing the rise of global competition and the energy crisis of 1973 brought about the demise of thousands of jobs. The rise of hopelessness went along with a steep increase in drug abuse and crime as well as politically motivated violence even as protests and strikes lacerated the city’s quotidian. Angry, dangerous, and ravaged by an ailing industrialism, Genoa became a “ghost city” (Ginsborg 2003: 17) where the leisurely fruition of public urban space had to yield in the face of a rapid decline, and an everyday life often marked by fear and despondency began to erode the urban pleasures of the Genoese.
In the 1980s, a rising critical stance vis-à-vis the logic of industrialism and its consequences for the environment and the lives of people spread all over Europe (Beck 1997: 38). This sentiment rose in Genoa, too, going along with a more reflexive stance toward an urban environment that, as the revitalization process began to take its first steps, intensified its role as not only an object of sensuous, material, and cultural consumption, but also as an arena and a tool for the creation of self-narratives involving lifestyle choices (Giddens 1991). During the late twentieth century, cities in Europe and North America developed an increasing focus on leisure and consumable experiences that blended high culture with the popular and the spectacular (Featherstone 2007: 94). In Genoa, too, this process drew on urban consumers’ growing hunger for experiences, their desire for self-development, and the appeal of skilled consumption and self-expression (Richards 2011: 1229) to further shape the middle-class habitus of exploring and enjoying the city purposefully. The latter began to unfold along an experiential continuum that ranges from the pursuit of leisure and sensuous fruition to aesthetic and historical appreciation (Richardson 2008: 148). Driven by the desire to replace this city’s ailing industries with a new economy of tourism, the partial reversal of some of the projects carried out in the name of industrial modernization and the recovery of Genoa’s premodern architecture began in the late 1980s. By then, the Italian media had begun to describe tourism as an “industry without chimneys,”