Ethnographic reflections on ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in two post-earthquake Italian cities

Abstract

This article explores the politicisation of cultural heritage during the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. It begins by critically addressing the positions of Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis, two prominent heritage intellectuals at the forefront of national campaigns to restore the damaged historic centre of L’Aquila. Both have been instrumental in shaping an ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in Italy that underscores the civic virtues of the nation’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously railing against its marketisation. Reflecting upon observations in L’Aquila, where locals involved in protests at government inaction have been scolded by fellow inhabitants for their lack of obeisance to cultural heritage, and drawing on longstanding ethnographic research in Naples, where heritage campaigns against redevelopment in the historic centre in the 1980s were later incorporated into an ambitious regeneration agenda, the article argues that this oppositional heritage discourse is not only premised upon idealist notions of collective identity but also, as a result of its attempts to legislate the boundaries of heritage citizenship and its disavowal of philologically incorrect relationships with historic centres, it ultimately provides tacit support to the very same neoliberal urban processes against which it claims to take a stand.

Keywords:

• Italy
• historic centres
• post-earthquake reconstruction
• oppositional heritage discourse
• neoliberal urbanisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Videos of the speeches by Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis in L’Aquila can be viewed here: https://laquila5maggio.wordpress.com (last accessed 15 May 2015).

2. For a historical overview of the Italian centro storico as both a concept and place, see Dines (2012).

3. The views of Settis and Montanari, for example, are regularly published or supported in the pages of the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, the anti-political establishment daily Il Fatto Quotidiano and the Italy’s leading centre-left newspaper La Repubblica.

4. A key exception is anthropologist Berardino Palumbo’s incisive critique of Salvatore Settis’ 2002 treatise on heritage Italia S.p.A. (Palumbo 2003, 367–382).

5. I do not want to suggest that urban restructuring or resistance to social cleansing are not themselves politically contradictory processes. As Herzfeld demonstrates in his study of Monti in Rome, the withdrawal of the mainstream Left from grassroots politics had seen localist elements of right-wing organisations – supportive of neoliberal reforms at national level – take a front-line role in opposing evictions in the neighbourhood (2009, 253–300).

6. Ethnographic fieldwork in Naples was conducted as a resident of the city between 1997 and 2004 and on subsequent frequent visits to the city. The oral history research on the 1980 earthquake was part of the ‘Memory and Place in the Twentieth-Century Italian City’ project based at University College London, which ran from 2001 to 2005 and collected a total of 42 testimonies in individual and group interviews.

7. For a discussion of the various shortcomings of the government’s housing programme in L’Aquila, see Alexander (2013, 63–67).

8. For an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party and the Neapolitan popular classes during the post-war period, see Dines (2014).

9. The term ‘enlightened bourgeoisie’ (borghesia illuminata) is used locally to refer to a liberal minority composed largely of members of the professional classes and descendants of the Southern Italian aristocracy that traces its origins back to the eighteenth-century Neapolitan enlightenment and the short-lived 1799 Parthenopean Republic. For over two centuries, this group has seen itself as a bastion of democracy in the face of a plebeian mass presumed to be susceptible to reactionary impulses and short-termism and, after the Second World War, a public sector-dependent middle class considered to be implicated in the degeneracy of post-war politics in Naples and the concomitant abandonment of the historic centre (Dines 2012, 59–67). The Napoli 99 Foundation, a cultural association set-up in 1984 that was at the centre of heritage campaigns during the late 1980s, was in fact named in honour of the city’s failed liberal revolution of 1799.

10. A video of the entry into the Red Zone can be viewed here: http://www.6aprile.it/media/video/2013/02/28/video-laquila-3-anni-fa-la-giornata-delle-carriole.html (last accessed 15 May 2015). While no arrests were made on the day, a month later the Police Special Branch (Digos) confiscated ten wheelbarrows and charged three protesters with organising a demonstration during the blackout period before a local election.

11. For a collection of audiovisual and written documents on the various Wheelbarrow Days held in L’Aquila during 2010, see the online archive Servizio Informativo sul Sisma Memoria L’Aquila: http://www.sismaq.it/

12. The collective reference point would later extend to the ‘whole of humanity’ after members of the same alliance succeeded in obtaining recognition of the historic centre as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1995.

13. Interview with Ciro Coppola (pseudonym) conducted 30 November 2002.