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