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