The tourists are back (and so are the polemics)
Plus, Khaby Lame and prophetic culture
In last week’s update I posted a story about Mario Draghi’s failure to take serious action to tackle the pollution problem at Taranto’s Ilva steel works. Well, over the weekend an international coalition of environmentalist groups including Fridays for Future announced that, due to this and other cases, they are preparing to sue the Italian government for neglecting to commit to the EU’s sustainable development targets. Draghi claims he wants to reduce carbon emissions by 33% over the next decade; and he’s allocated €59bn for investment in green initiatives to do so. The campaigners, though, say the plans have been designed to fall short; and they are therefore calling on the courts to “recognise that the Italian government is not complying with respect to its obligation to protect the population from climatic change.” There’s no realistic way this lawsuit can succeed, of course. Nevertheless, it’s proved an effective PR stunt, and it’s an encouraging sign that Italy’s green movements are beginning to regroup and find creative ways to engage media attention in the midst of the pandemic.
Residents in Venice are apoplectic about the return of giant cruise ships to the waters around the city centre. On Thursday, the gargantuan ‘MSC Orchestra’ entered the waters of the historic centre in order to ferry passengers from the northern Italian mainland to Bari, in the southern Adriatic. The ship was met by hundreds of protesters from the ‘no grandi navi’ movement, who shouted slogans at the vessel from their small boats. These scenes are fairly common in Venice, of course. What makes this case different is that the pandemic was supposed to mark a turning point away from mass tourism. In March, Draghi insisted that cruise ships would be banned in the centre of Venice, and the cultural secretary, Dario Franceschini, also re-iterated that this was, truly, the end for the ‘big boats.’ Well, it seems, alas, that this was a load of hot air, and that the giant vessels will indeed continue to pass through until a new terminal is built. Unsurprisingly many citizens now feel insulted and ignored. Few Venetians are against tourism per se. ‘No grandi navi’ are arguing, quite reasonably, that the ships damage the delicate ecosystem of the surrounding lagoon, dwarf the beauty of the UNESCO heritage surroundings, and encourage a kind of superficial day-tripper tourist culture which is of limited economic benefit to the city and which contributes to overcrowding. Having lived in Venice myself many moons ago, and experienced these problems first hand, I personally think it’d be hard to disagree with any of their arguments.
A word of warning: if you’re planning a trip to Sardinia this summer don’t even think about packing up any sand to take away. Yep. You read that correctly. In recent years, growing numbers of visitors have been smuggling out tonnes of the island’s distinctive white and pinky microquartz pebbles in glass bottles. The phenomenon is now so common that in 2017 the authorities were actually forced to pass a law to regulate it. Most of those who are caught are simply unaware of the rule and, generally speaking, are simply planning to take a jar or two home as a souvenir. Others, though, have been selling the sand on ebay and similar sites for hundreds of euros a kilogram. According to the BBC: “military and customs police in Sardinia [are now] monitoring airports and harbours, and also searching websites for illegal sales. Tourists attempting to remove bottled sand in their luggage have been caught during customs checks using X-rays.” The police have already claimed €13,000 in fines and have established a task force to return the sands to areas from which they have been taken. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Arts and culture: Italy’s TikTok megastar
I’m a bit late to the party on this one I know. If you’ve never heard of Khaby Lame - though - then you must absolutely google him. When he lost his job in a factory at the start of pandemic, the 21 year old from Piemonte decided to start producing short videos for TikTok making fun of all those ‘life hack’ clips you can find on YouTube. The format is simple. Khaby intersperses segments of particularly cringe-worthy digital marketing content and responds in cynical silence, communicating only through mime, shrugs and weird facial expressions. It doesn’t sound like much; and, in a sense, it isn’t. But in the space of just two months, the young man has accrued an astonishing 917.4 million TikTok likes (to put that in perspective this is more than Fedez, the pop star, who has been constantly on TV and working with fashion brands on ads for over a decade). Khaby is now so famous that even the New York Times has written a profile of him, published under the headline “the Everyman of the Internet” — quite the accolade for a young lad from a provincial Italian town (Chivasso)! The NYT piece is also worth reading for its account of Khaby’s struggle to obtain full Italian citizenship rights (he has lived here since he was just a few months old, but as he was born in Senegal he, rather absurdly, fails to qualify automatically). Read more about him, and his story, here.
I want to make a couple of book-related shout-outs. First, in case you’re reading this from Florence, my good friend the Armenian-British author Baret Magarian is doing an event about the Italian translation of his novel The Fabrications (Le macchinazioni) next week. I was hoping to be on the panel to discuss but will sadly be out of town. You can hear him talk, though, in Italian, at Il Conventino on 15 June @ 18:00. This is a great book by a great author in a great venue. So do head along if you can, and have a think about purchasing the ENG version here. For everyone else, I really recommend checking out this upcoming release by the philosopher Federico Campagna, which is called Prophetic Culture. Federico is one of the few philosophers I actually take the time to read these days; his writing is erudite, profound, original and, I think, offers a beautiful window through which to understand the times we’re living in. His latest book promises to offer “a multi-dimensional cosmology, nestled within every speck of reality […] a constant insurrection against the rule of mortality, which severs the solidarity between worlds.” It is, in other words, another esoteric attempt to escape the logic of nihilism which so defines the (post)modern imagination. The book is out with Bloomsbury on 17 June, and you can listen to elements of the argument on his podcast series Overmorrow’s Library. I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into this one.
Recipe of the week: Aquapazza
Fish cooked in “crazy water” is a summer classic. It goes something like this. Take a mediterranean white fish - bream is best here - and steam it slowly, covered, in a thin layer of chopped cherry tomatoes and water, flavoured with chilli, parsley and oil. Cooked this way, the fish comes out tender as anything. The best bit though is the “crazy water” itself, which thickens over the heat, thus transforming into a beautiful and simple broth. Get yourself some bread to dip in (I recommend a Sicilian-style loaf with sesame seeds) and bang you’ve got a full meal. There are plenty of recipes out there for this dish. I’m unashamed to admit, though, I rather like this video version by Jamie Oliver’s partner in crime Gennaro Contaldo, which is a) a perfectly good recipe and b) a very entertaining watch. “I love it” as Mr. Contaldo would say.
That’s it for this week - as ever I do hope you enjoyed this instalment. If you haven’t already, please do follow the ‘Week in Italy’ Facebook page, or my twitter, for a few extra links and easy-access to the substack archive. If this email was forwarded to you, or you’re accessing on the web and would like to receive further updates, you can subscribe using this link below. Thanks!
About Me
My name is Jamie Mackay (@JacMackay) and I’m an author, editor and translator based in Florence. I’ve been writing about Italy for a decade for international media including The Guardian, The Economist, Frieze, and Art Review. I launched ‘The Week in Italy’ to share a more direct and regular overview of the debates and dilemmas, innovations and crises that sometimes pass under the radar of our overcrowded news feeds.
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