“Knowing what to wear and how to wear it” (26) is always an issue in Italy, especially if you are a woman. Having grown up there, I identified quite readily with the author’s recollections of arguments she had with her Italian-Canadian mother when Giovanna was faulted for being, in her mother’s eyes, underdressed: presenting oneself in public was of consequence to our reputation and prospects, we were told, and as young feminists we each seem to have resented and resisted that. Later, when conducting extensive fieldwork in 1993 and 1994 in her mother’s hometown in central Italy, Giovanna Del Negro responded as a fine ethnographer—a “halfie” one (68) in Kirin Narayan’s words—to having her public appearance scrutinized and commented on by the older women: she asked questions, observed how cutting a fine figure played out with different groups in town, and listened with an ear to what was at stake for those dressing up or down and those seeking to police such performances. Her book presents a detailed, culturally-specific, and gendered analysis of the seeing/being seen dynamics in this small town, identified by the fictitious name of Sasso. But it is more than that. Based on the realization that the promenade in Sasso is no daily constitutional but the centerpiece of a ritual performance, La Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town focuses on the passeggiata as constitutive of the townspeople’s negotiations with modernity. The theoretical goals and implications of such a focus are significant for the discipline of folklore studies.
The first part of Chapter 1, “Our Little Paris,” introduces the town of Sasso, its history in relation to the North/South divide that continues to mar Italy’s perception of itself, the post-World War II emigration that left the town with half of its population, the enterprise and ecotourism that contributed to the rapid economic transformation of the region in the 1980s and 1990s, and the corruption scandals uncovered by mani pulite (the “clean hands” operation) in the early 1990s. The portrait that emerges from Del Negro’s words is that of a modern town where emigration and “remigration” cohabit and where people may be quite critical of their officials but are proud of the style of their “piccola Parigi dell’Abruzzo” (the little Paris of the Abruzzo) (14). The second part of the chapter introduces the passeggiata—where it takes place, who participates and how, how it has changed historically from an aristocratic weekly display of leisure to a daily performance of Sasso’s modern economy and more democratic social relations. Del Negro’s argument is that people in Sasso are invested in being “modern” and that the passeggiata down Sasso’s corso (main street) is where and when they debate what that modernity means to them: whether they are critical or celebratory of the passeggiata, “Sassani themselves represent the promenade as an emblem of civic pride” (35) and their “performances… in the piazza are meditations on modernity” (4).
Chapter 2, “Modernity in Folklore, Social Thought, and the Field Encounter,” brings home the interdisciplinary frame and consequences of Del Negro’s methodology and goals. The section on “Folklore and Modernity” (42–51) is a particularly clear and pointed discussion of how folklore scholars from William Thoms to Richard Bauman have approached the dialectics of tradition and modernity. Del Negro, then, describes how she sees several traditions of scholarship converging in this book: social studies of globalization and modernity (Arjun Appadurai and Janet Abu-Lughod) that emphasize “increased cultural difference” (56); the influential work of Erving Goffman and performance-oriented folkloristics; feminist analyses of the body and socialization; Mediterranean ethnographies; autoethnography. Informed by this convergence, her expressed goal is to push at disciplinary seams as she focuses on “an expressive form that defies neoromantic ideas about folklore and modernity” (50), explores “on-the-ground lived experiences of social change in a specific locale” (53), learns from “the meanings that on-the-ground actors find in those processes” (58), emphasizes “nonlinguistic behavior in performance events” (62), and takes on her own cultural past while mindful of the “overly self-involved stance” of some reflexive ethnographers (72).
Chapters 3 and 4 zoom in on specific social events and dynamics to examine representations of Sasso from different perspectives. Del Negro writes: “This panoramic snapshot of contemporary life in Sasso will help us to understand better the larger social and ideological contexts in which the passeggiata is situated” (74). The discussions in “Light Industry and Accordions: Representations of Contemporary Sassano Identity” concerning Sasso’s postcards, a television show on local corruption, and community games are each quite interesting and successful in pointing out how local and national perspectives on the region and town differ, and Sassani must counter stereotypes that define them as behind the times. The focus of Chapter 4 is “changing gender roles” in Sasso (103) as articulated in the various gendered responses to three social events: the disappearance of a celebrity couple’s daughter in New Orleans in 1994 (an event that had high visibility in the media and raised issues of sexuality and race), the popular Argentinian TV series Milagros, and the drug and prostitution scandal that closed down the town’s only disco in 1993. I really enjoyed reading this chapter: Del Negro’s nuanced analysis brings out gender expectations in Sasso as framed by other social dynamics such as local identity, cosmopolitanism, religion, class, and age.
Chapter 5, “Seeing and Being Seen in the Sassano Passeggiata,” is the heart of the book. Here Del Negro brings detail to the hypothesis she presented in the first chapter and pays attention both to “the players on stage” (124), that is, in the passeggiata—their clothes, attitude or posture, glances, position in the corso or piazza—and the interpretations Sassani have of these aesthetic and social performances. By participating in the passeggiata, the old men, the old women, the professional women, the teenage girls, and the teenage boys are all, in their different ways, “staking [their] place” (143) in the local society. Del Negro suggests that, overall, style is connected with integrity in people’s minds and that fare una bella figura—what our mothers wanted and the town overall wants—or cutting a fine figure is intrinsically tied for Sassani to the “importance of sociability,” meaning their “interdependence” (145) but also their communal construction of Sasso as a “modern” town. “Taken together, these various ‘stakings of place’ produce a representation of the entire, highly differentiated collectivity, a kind of kinetic sculpture of village life” (152). The brief conclusion, “Our Modernity,” recapitulates the goals of the book and the main ways in which the passeggiata in Sasso relates to modernity. Throughout the volume, black and white stills contribute to an understanding of the theatrical display of the passeggiata and reinforce Del Negro’s points.
The argument of La Passeggiata pulls the book together very tightly. I found it persuasive, but am left wondering about the potentially oppressive policing that this daily performance involves and about the inhabitants of Sasso who, like Paola in Chapter 5, refuse to participate in the passeggiata. Would more attention to conflicts, resistance, and denaturalization have produced a different picture of Sasso or simply made it more varied in its modernity? The same assertions and examples are repeated in different parts of the book; and discussions in Chapters 3 and 4, which are interesting per se, are made to connect, even if only loosely, to the book’s focus on the passeggiata. The detailed ethnography also leaves me wishing for a comparative analysis of how Sasso’s passeggiata compares with others, especially in the South, but also in large cities like Rome and vacation destinations across Italy. Finally, I have some really tiny quibbles: to me—but I come from a different Italian experience and background—the translations from Abruzzese and Italian are somewhat stilted; and observations such as “folklorists like Katharine Young and Deborah Kapchan echo [Baldassare] Castiglione’s belief in the centrality of the body in social life” (65) seem forced. But all these are small flaws in an innovative book that offers a lot both ethnographically and theoretically.
La Passeggiata is the recipient of the Elli Kongas-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society for outstanding work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or for work on feminist theory in folklore. In my reading, the analysis is indeed at its strongest in the discussion of gender roles and expectations and also in the refutation of Sasso as a backward place: Del Negro counters stereotypes well and demands a re-orientation in our attitude towards village or small-town “traditions” in Italy. As a case study, La Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town: Folklore and the Performance of Modernity succeeds in approaching ethnography in a small Italian town as well as questions of gender in it from a refreshing perspective that aligns itself with new directions in both Mediterranean and Italian-North American Studies, and advances a performance-oriented folkloristics where the aesthetic focus is socially meaningful. I would recommend it for gender, ethnography, cultural studies, and folklore theory courses.
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[Review length: 1493 words • Review posted on September 26, 2006]