2004). This is the form of hope that drives the pursuit of a better life—a notion that has its roots in Christianity as much as it draws on the faith in progress promoted by the Enlightenment (Mayr 1992: 117). In Genoa’s case, hope includes first and foremost the possibility to make a living and improve the circumstances of one’s life.
In his ethnography of Zambia, James Ferguson (1999) provided a poignant analysis of the disconnection experienced by people when the modernization prospected by industrialization was suddenly derailed. In a similar vein, writing about how young Ethiopian men lost hope as neoliberal reforms curtailed their employment opportunities, Daniel Mains (2012) described the stagnation and despair that unfold when the narrative of personal and collective progress is interrupted. While the African settings of Ferguson’s and Mains’s ethnographies are quite different from the circumstances at hand in Genoa, the underlying collective narrative—the promise of modernization, its interruption, and the ensuing stagnation and despair—is remarkably similar. In Genoa, too, the relative prosperity and stability brought about by twentieth-century industrialization found an abrupt end in the 1970s. Blue-collar jobs that, up to then, had been readily available to the point of attracting a considerable migration from the south of the country became increasingly scanty. The tertiary sector that had been experiencing steady growth due to the expansion of the public administration and the state-run industries also slowed down. In the face of rising desperation, political parties and powerful individuals fastened their iron grip on the scarce employment opportunities, which they kept bartering in return for favors, cash, and power. It is in this context, I suggest, that the spread of north Atlantic neoliberal ideologies with their rhetoric of meritocracy brought about a new wave of hopefulness in the 1990s in the face of Genoa’s continuing decline. The neoliberal hope that spanned the decades of the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s pivoted on urban revitalization to prospect the possibility for change. This entailed in the first place the promise of employment and opportunities in the rising sector of tourism and cultural consumption; it also prospected a better quality of the urban everyday: one that entails, among others, increased safety from crime and violence and, with it, the fruition of a public sociability that, in much of Italy, is conceptualized as not just a desirable but also a necessary part of one’s life in the city (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2007; Moretti 2015). Yet, embedded as it was in a capitalist dynamic whereby, as Laurent Berlant (2011: 171) put it, “if you’re lucky you get to be exploited, and if you’re lucky you can avoid one more day being the focus of a scene that hails and ejects you when it is your time to again become worthless,” even this neoliberal version of hope was of the cruel kind, in that it, too, contained the seed of its own failure (Berlant 2011). I conclude this chapter with the discussion of how, by the early 2000s, even the hopefulness brought about by Genoa’s revitalization became collateral damage to the dystopic, and equally neoliberal, rhetoric that “there is no alternative” (Harvey 2000: 17, 2007: 40). There is no alternative to the austerity measures imposed on all but the very wealthiest in the name of Italy’s membership in the European Union, nor is there any alternative to the precarity of people whose disposability has become the only certainty in their lives (Butler 2006; Mole 2011).
The Beginning of the End
This story begins in the 1970s. As the seat of several of Italy’s heavy industries and a vertex of the “industrial triangle” that had driven the country’s economic miracle of the 1960s, Genoa by then had a longstanding industrial tradition, though one that had grown in the shade of the Italian state and its subsidies. The cityscape of those years bore witness to this industrialization as well as to the ravages of World War II: even the Carlo Felice opera theater was still a pile of rubble defacing Piazza de Ferrari, the heart of Genoa’s downtown. The imposing early twentieth-century city center was constantly grey with soot, and the bleak industrial peripheries had cannibalized previously pleasant maritime and rural villages. As a constant reminder that workers had had to choose between their life and their livelihood, until the early 2000s Cornigliano’s steelworks kept spewing fumes that reeked of rot and spread cancer. In the meantime, a swath of the centro storico had been bulldozed and turned into the Centro dei Liguri administrative complex—yet another example of failed modernist architecture. Known as sopraelevata, a junction was built to connect the city center with the industrial peripheries; while aiding transit, it visually and physically separated the old city from the sea. Bourgeois neighborhoods such as Albaro continued to revel in their architectural and natural beauty, but the rationality of modernist urbanism did not contemplate issues of quality of life—let alone aesthetic pleasure—for working-class neighborhoods (Avila 2014; Lefebvre 1978: 77).
Figure 2. Genoa’s neighborhoods. Map by Jessica M. Moss and Luciano Rosselli.
As to the centro storico, this is how, in 1974, popular Genoese singer and songwriter Fabrizio de Andrè described it in his Città vecchia (Old City) lyrics:
If you walk along the old docks
In that thick air loaded with salt and swollen with smell
There you will find the thieves the murderers and the strange guy
Who sold his mother to a midget for three thousand lire.
Back then, a considerable portion of the centro storico was still in shambles: piles of rubbles memorialized the wounds inflicted by allied bombs during World War II first, and, after that, by the continuing neglect exercised by local administrators. Many of its buildings were empty, deserted by all but the occasional drug addict, and infested by the hordes of rats that nested in the medieval sewage system and were said to outnumber residents seven to one. The viable apartment complexes were sparsely populated. Many of the ground floor spaces that had, in centuries bygone, hosted thriving businesses were now used for storage—and, when the first immigration waves from the Maghreb began in the 1970s, for cramming people in diminutive rooms in return for exorbitant rents. Floating above the dark, damp spaces of poverty, frequently empty frescoed apartments and penthouses with roof balconies suspended over a breathtaking view of the sea bore witness to the grandeur of the past, ready to spearhead the gentrification process that was to begin twenty years later. Back in the 1970s, however, the neighborhood catered predominantly to working-class families of mixed Genoese and Southern Italian provenance; elderly Genoese; hippie, anarchist, and Ultraleft communes; and a heterogeneous crowd of drug addicts, pushers, prostitutes, and smugglers.
In those years, many of the residents of Genoa’s better-off neighborhoods such as Albaro would not have been caught dead in the caruggi (the alleys of the old city, as they are called in local dialect). “Too dangerous” was the general opinion. Following dynamics common to other South European cities (McDonogh 1987), for people from the lower-middle-class to upper-class uptown (circonvallazione a monte) who lived a short walking distance from the centro storico, a cautious excursion to this part of town had the prurient thrill of slumming or, better said, social tourism. After World War II, young men used to take walks through the centro storico to demonstrate their masculinity and bravado. Young women, instead, avoided it altogether, or took only quick trips to its well-known stores—but never alone. In the Genoa of those years, going to the centro storico had taken on the connotation of a “discesa agli inferi”: a descent to the netherworld (Fusero et al. 1991: 86) that few were willing to undertake.
Drugs and the City
The Genoa of the 1950s, wrote sociologist Luciano Cavalli (1960), had been a “divided city” where neighborhood boundaries marked the separations between social classes as well as the intensification of the mistrust between the communist working classes from the peripheries and the Catholic bourgeoisie of better-off neighborhoods. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the spread of Marxist ideas and the growing dissatisfaction with Italy’s hierarchical and exclusionary society, its authoritarian and elitist education system, the exploitation of labor, dominant sexual and family mores, and even institutionalized communism
