The role of Nostalgia in regenerating Veronetta

Alma mater studiorum – Università di Bologna Scuola di Lettere e Beni culturali Corso di laurea magistrale in Semiotica The role of Nostalgia in regenerating Veronetta Professor: Maria Patrizia Violi Student: Riccardo Soave Semiotics of Memory A.A. 2017/2018 Table of contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 Veronetta and its actual identity ...................................................................................................................... 5 Places, practices and borders ........................................................................................................................... 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................11 References.........................................................................................................................................................12 2 Abstract This short essay outlines some reflections on the role of Nostalgia in the regenerating process that is now taking place in Veronetta, which is a wide neighborhood located in Verona. The work first gives an overview of the historical background and the birth of the neighborhood. Then, it discusses the recent shift in the way Veronetta is being considered and narrated by the media sphere. And finally, it shows how Nostalgia is acting as a catalyst in the regenerating process, by analyzing relevant sites and outstanding practices in which the past is somehow present and shared by different people. To conclude, it argues that in this case Nostalgia does not play a restorative role in the neighborhood: on the contrary, it is inextricably linked to the regeneration of Veronetta and to the progress of the whole community. 3 Il n’y a pas de territoire sans un vecteur de sortie du territoire.1 Gilles Deleuze Introduction Verona has been always considered as the city of love, but now it revealed to be something else. Recently, the city has been criticized by the media sphere to be “the city of Hate”2: many argue that Verona is a rigid place in which many extreme-right parties and football culture3 play a crucial role and an increasing number of attacks to immigrants, homosexuals and antifascists4 might confirm this theory. Despite the way Verona is being narrated, during the last two decades a very tiny vecteur de sortie has been discovered, and along this crooked road many locals, students and immigrants kept on gathering together in order to give Verona a brighter future, or what we could call a sortie, a way out. This place is Veronetta, a very huge neighborhood, located in the eastside. However, it has never been considered as a vivid and flourishing part of the city and we will now see the reasons why. First of all, the name of this neighborhood comes from the french Veronette, which was the disparaging way by which the French, at the beginning of the 19th century, after the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), called the part of the city which was not belonging to Napoleon, but to the Austrians. This division remained up to 1805, as the Austrians lost the war against the French: after that, the eastside and the westside of Verona were reunited. Nevertheless, after Napoleon’s defeat, Verona returned to be part of Austria with the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Finally, in 1866 Verona became part of United Italy, as the Italian Army entered in Verona fighting the Austrian Army, during the Third war of independence. Since then, even though there were not borders anymore between the city and what was called Veronetta, this 1 Gilles Deleuze (1988), Abecedaire, (A, Animal). Giovanni Bitetto (2018), Come Verona è diventata l’incubatrice dell’odio, The Vision. 3 Cf. Giulia Siviero (2018), Verona, dove comanda l’estrema destra, Il Post. 4 Cf. F.Q. (2018), Verona, coppia gay denuncia aggressione in centro: insulti omofobi e schiaffi da un gruppo di ragazzi, Il fatto quotidiano; “Verona: indossa t-shirt antifascista, aggredito e picchiato, Blitz quotidiano. 2 4 neighborhood maintained its characteristics of being a sort of storage area, which was functional to the sustenance of the whole city. In this way, the government did not take care of its management. The overall conditions escalated in 1882, when a tremendous flood hit Verona, and from that time Veronetta was left in its misery for nearly 100 years. After that, in 1973 a very long process of urban regeneration began to improve the conditions of the neighborhood, but it started to be effective only recently. Veronetta and its actual identity As many researchers started to consider this regeneration with the Atlas project5, there was a significant shift in the way the media sphere narrated Veronetta, as we can see from the following headlines: Figure 1 Veronasera. Figure 2 Univr magazine. Figure 3 L’Arena. Figure 4 Veronasera. All these titles concern the Atlas project, which was carried out by a team of researchers, including architects, urban planners and sociologists, who devoted themselves to the study of this regeneration. It is quite interesting seeing how the term Veronetta has now been 5 Atlas Veronetta is a project achieved by a team of researchers coming from different fields of study. Two main research institutes joined together in this research: on one hand, the Humanities and the Law department of the university of Verona, on the other hand the Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (LAA- LAVUE) ensa Paris La Villette, but many other groups contributed to the project as well. The overall aim was to explore Veronetta and its transformation over the last fifty years. 5 axiologized with euphoria, thanks to the help of this research. Besides, there is a combination between static and dynamic terms: on one hand, Veronetta is safe and controlled (“quartiere sicuro”, “analizzata”), on the other hand, the neighborhood is constantly evolving and transforming itself (“viaggio”, “Verona che cambia”, “trasformazione”). This contrast is clearly functional in creating a sort of curiosity in the readers, since the neighborhood is both safe and unpredictable at the same time. In this way, Veronetta became a central place for a wide range of people, including students, families and immigrants, and this ethnic and cultural mixture is what let Veronetta be totally different from the city center, which is more rigid, static and controlled. Places, practices and borders While the city center struggled to constantly renew its form in many ways, for instance, by changing the signboards of its shops, in order to be as much competitive as possible, Veronetta, even though it is still facing a series of challenges in its forms and in its contents, maintained many features of the past and it recreated in many cases practices from the past. This sense of Nostalgia could be read through a semiotic perspective: according to A.J. Greimas, Nostalgia is a passion that assumes a sort of “disjunction” (Pezzini 1991: 21) between an object of Value in the past and a dysphoric component against the present. However, while it is arguably true that the main feeling is not a conjunction with the object of value, there is a controversial thymic component, as Svetlana Boym wrote, by distinguishing between restorative and reflective nostalgia: Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. […] Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots – the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves details, not symbols. At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias. (Boym 2002: 16) Even though the sense of dysphoria is inextricably linked to the thymic component of Nostalgia, there is a significant concern about the present: reflective nostalgia is not a complain, on the contrary it is a way to live the present without trying to bring back the past. 6 Before underlining which aspects of nostalgia are present in the regeneration process of Veronetta, it is better to show and discuss the most nostalgic places, objects and practices of this neighborhood. The first case is the main border between the eastside and the city, the Porta from where the Italian army entered in the city to fight the Austrian army. This is the main point from which people coming from the eastside can enter in the city and this is the reason why its usage is massive. Both cars, bikes and pedestrians must pass through the Porta, but only by walking people can easily see different signs which narrate what happened there in 1866: in this way, there is an overall awareness of the facts concerning the main historical facts of that year. Figure 5 Carlo Ferrari, Figure 6 Porta Vescovo. Piazza Santa Toscana e Porta Vescovo, 1847. The second rail station of Verona, Verona Porta Vescovo, is very close to the Porta, and it is totally different from the main rail station, Verona Porta Nuova: while this station totally changed itself over the last twenty years, Verona Porta Nuova remained almost the same, by maintaining its original structure, especially its old bar with the old chairs, the old benches as well as the signboard which you can see in Figure 7. Figure 7 Verona Porta Vescovo railway station. Figure 8 The alleway. 7 Around Porta Vescovo and the rail station there are many memorials and monuments. The first one (Figure 9) is the only one located on the outside and it narrates the facts concerning the Italian army entering in Verona. The second one (Figure 10 and 11) is located along the alleyway before the rail station and it is a huge memorial to the national railway and partisans with an original locomotive stuck in the middle of the memorial. Figure 9 Figure 10 Fi gure 11 Another site is one of the most successful architectural works in Verona: Santa Marta campus. Santa Marta was a huge complex of military architecture, originally used for the production and storage of bread, grain and other troop rations, now it became one of the main buildings of the University of Verona. The building was one of the most impressive logistic areas in the Austrian stronghold in Verona. Between 2007 and 2015 a long process of regeneration took place and it became part of the University of Verona. As you can see from the Figures 12, 13 and 14, the main structure remained the same, while the rest of the building was modernized. Figure 12 Main entrance. Figure 13 Details of the building. Figure 14 Details of the building. 8 Despite this modern sense of efficiency and functionality, Santa Marta includes in its surroundings a kind of territory which is difficult to describe: this is what Gilles Clément tried to define as a part of “espaces indécis, dépourvus de function sur lesquels il est difficile de porter un nom” (Clément 2014: 37), as a part of the Tiers Paysage. This kind of landscape comprises terrains vagues, blank places that are not considered by the map logic (Cf. Farinelli 2009: 190), which are, on the contrary, indispensable for the human being. Figures 15, 16 and 17 Santa Marta and its surroundings. This terrain vague, instead of being a mere desolate area, is fundamental for practices such as the Sinhalese New Year. The team of the Atlas Veronetta project argued that the Sri Lankan community is one of the widest groups of the neighborhood (Cf. De Biase, Zanini 2018: 74), but instead of being a closed reunion, this event kept on being open to all the other communities, including the Christian one. This is the reason why even the blank places are extremely important for Veronetta, as the researchers showed: In che modo luoghi che fino a qualche decennio fa ospitavano persone (operai prima, studenti dopo) e contribuivano a far vivere il quartiere, potranno rigenerare senso per il quartiere? Il fatto che questi luoghi emergano è significativo non solo per il valore che hanno nella memoria delle persone ma anche per il valore urbano che ricoprono o che potrebbero accogliere in futuro, proprio perché nel passato hanno già svolto un ruolo importante nella socialità del quartiere e ritmato l’uso dello spazio pubblico. (De Biase, Zanini 2018: 112) As a core of the social life in Veronetta, this place allows us to live on a border between the present and the past, without forcing us to live it in a specific way, by following external rules. 9 The refuse of external rules and the need of public spaces where it is possible to act and perform in a different way is what can be seen in some practices and performances, such as Balera Veronetta and Verona Risuona. Figure 18 The event poster. Figures 19 and 20 Pictures from the event. Balera Veronetta takes place every year during the summer, since 2012, in Parco Santa Toscana, next to Porta Vescovo. It lasts three days and it is promoted by several cultural centers. The term Balera evokes the sense of meeting and socialization which was typical of the old baleras, which were rooms used for dancing by the low and middle-class people since 19th century. One of the most interesting facts about this initiative is that it tries to combine the music and the dances of the past with new genres, such as afro or hard gipsy rock. In this way, there is a meeting between the past and the present, between young people and the elderly, but also between different cultures. This event is generally successful in allowing people to meet, have fun and enjoy the neighborhood, because, as Jurij Michajlovic Lotman thought, every culture needs a plurality of languages to exist: Ogni cultura, per essere viva, produttiva di sempre nuova informazione, deve connettere almeno due lingue. La creatività nasce sempre e solo nella relazione (la relazione con l’Altro, col diverso, con l’esterno – tutti modi per dire: con un altro linguaggio) e dunque il pluralismo della cultura non è tanto una caratteristica di fatto, quanto una condizione sine qua non. (Lorusso 2010: 57) This meeting between two different languages is the same that takes place with Verona Risuona, which is a festival in which everyone can join in several parts of the city. It involves art, dance, acting and many of these performances relate to the past. This event involves both the city center and Veronetta and it is one of the few moments in which these two parts of the city meet each other. 10 Figure 21 The event poster. Figure 22 A picture from the event. There is another place which is relevant to the neighborhood and its name is Teatro Camploy. It is located in the heart of Veronetta and since 1998 it kept on being one of the main cultural centers for the community. The number of plays in dialect is high even though the majority of the neighborhood is composed by immigrants and students who do not understand the language. However, these kinds of play, as well as some African shows or recent films, allow the theatre to be a place where still a dialogue is possible between different cultures. Figure 23 A play by Goldoni at Teatro Camploy. Figure 24 An event poster. Conclusion The central places and practices of the social life in Veronetta are extremely linked to a sense of Nostalgia. It is certainly true that “the twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia” (Boym 2002: 13), but we should not consider Nostalgia as a negative outcome of this century. As a matter of fact, the futuristic utopia by which the twentieth century began ended up with failing results, including war, hatred and financial crisis. Abandoning useless places, such as Veronetta, was another drawback of that ideal, which did consider the city center as the only functional core of a city. 11 In this way, the sense of Nostalgia could be a key in understanding the city in a different perspective, for instance, by avoiding the functional logic which would exclude places like Veronetta. Thanks to these materialized forms of Nostalgia, Veronetta, from a forgotten space, started to be a remembering place, and this prospect let the neighborhood experience the city in a lively way. This is the reason why Nostalgia should not be considered as a negative passion: as Svetlana Boym said, “Nostalgia is not all about the past, it can be retrospective, but also prospective” (Boym 2002: 15), in this way, “fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future” (Ibidem). The direct effect on future realities is what has been already registered during the recent years in Veronetta, as many social groups joined together in living the neighborhood, mostly people coming from a different city or a different country. Thus, Nostalgia “is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into local and universal possible” (Boym 2002: 16). This is what can be seen in Veronetta, especially during some great events like Balera Veronetta, Verona risuona and many others. To conclude, the sense of Nostalgia has been productive in Veronetta, instead of being a sheer reflection, due to the fact that this passion is able to combine the past with the present and to let people living on a border between what is belonging to them and what is not. In this way, Nostalgia allowed Veronetta experiencing a rise in terms of different languages and this plurality, which guaranteed the regeneration process of the neighborhood, is what might allow the whole city to grow in its cultural, social and political aspects. References Bauman, 2017 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia, Editori Laterza, Bari-Roma. Boym, 2002 Svetlana Boym, The future of Nostalgia, Basic books, New York. 12 Clément, 2014 Gilles Clément, Le Tiers Paysage, Sens et tonka, Paris. De Biase, Zanini, 2018 Alessia De Biase, Piero Zanini, Esplorazioni temporali di un quartiere, Atlas #1, Laa Recherches. Deleuze, Guattari, 2003 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Mille piani, Cooper&Castelvecchi, Roma. Farinelli, 2009 Franco Farinelli, La crisi della ragione cartografica, Einaudi, Torino. Lorusso 2010 Anna Maria Lorusso, Semiotica della cultura, Editori Laterza, Bari. Lynch, 2001 Kevin Lynch, L’immagine della città, Marsilio Editori, Padova. 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