The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town: Folklore and the Performance of Modernity (review)

The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town by Giovanna P. Del Negro examines the relationship between the practices of everyday life and the negotiation of modernity in a town (to which Del Negro assigns the pseudonym "Sasso") in the Abruzzo province of central Italy. In her study, Del Negro examines a range of expressive culture from face-to-face events like the evening passeggiata (or promenade) and festive games to mass-mediated forms such as a popular soap opera, televised court proceedings, postcards, and reactions to local and national news stories. The result is a clear, accessible, and well-written work that transcends conventional genre and "folk"-oriented approaches to explore the interpenetration of cultural performance, consumerism, the mass media, and modernization.

Del Negro's central idea is that, for Sassani, the passeggiata is a means of enacting and thinking about modernity and, more broadly, that dramatic social change does not follow uniformly set Western patterns but is rather culturally specific and historically contingent. The concept of multiple modernities, which, as the phrase indicates, postulates the existence of a variety of modernities, is central to Del Negro's thought. Drawing on performance theory, cultural studies, multiple modernity scholarship, and gender studies, Del Negro argues that modernity is a process of becoming that is negotiated in a variety of communicative practices, and she explores the multiple ways Sassani use both face-to-face events and the mass media to shape their own version of modernity in this corner of the world. In doing so, she covers a range of topics such as changing gender roles, political scandal, industrialization, emigration and return, and the role of aesthetics in the construction of modern Italian life.

This book has several strengths, only a few of which can be highlighted here. One important contribution is that it focuses on the negotiation of modernity in contemporary Europe. Europe (or at least Western Europe) is often figured as "already modern." Thus, the very location at the center of Del Negro's work calls into question conventional assumptions about modernity and contributes to a body of scholarship critiquing traditional constructions of modernity. Perhaps even more importantly, however, Del Negro ethnographically documents a version of modernity created by and for Sassani, thus adding Sassani thought to the debates.

Further, at heart the book is an analysis of style. Sassani are obsessed with fashion and body image; the passeggiata puts personal style and taste on display to present the cosmopolitan self. Since stylistic analysis is central to the folkloristic enterprise, this glimpse into how the world of European haute couture is incorporated into small-town, everyday life provides information in an area that is usually ignored in our field.

Finally, Del Negro engages her subject reflexively; her mother is from Sasso and Del Negro grew up with stories about the town. She writes, "[t]he Sasso of my mother's narratives was a place where clothing and style mattered. . . . In her stories, powerful politicians were not just powerful politicians but elegant older men taking long and commanding strides in well-cut gray serge. . . . Provocative teenagers overtly flirted with the opposite sex, and no sartorial detail, from the cut of a skirt to an ill mended hem, was ever left unreported" (pp. 3–4). As the daughter of Italian immigrants, Del Negro has a personal stake in her material that she discusses openly and honestly.

As with all publications, there are some weaknesses as well. One minor carp is that the quality of the images is rather poor. Most are not photographs but rather blurry video stills. Del Negro solicited expert local commentary on her field videos, and by sharing these images she allows readers to see exactly the passeggiata events upon which her natively informed analysis is built, but it's a difficult trade-off. As the book...