I feel like a pioneer in the field of medicine who has discovered the symptoms of a new disease, but has not yet found the right words to describe it. I will try anyway, in the hope that my attempt will contribute to the search for a cure. The disease manifests itself as a kind of saudade in reverse: people who have never been to the country come there for the first time and find that they have missed it all their lives, even if they never realized it before. The disease has three features that make it almost unique in the history of human pathology. Some features are geographical, others are temporary, the latter, so to speak, demographic. This is a geographical type: symptoms only occur within Italian national borders. Temporary: the disease manifests itself with maximum virulence between the first decade of July and the fourth of August. Finally, a demographic feature: the most sensitive and fragile subjects seem to be American celebrities in their fifties and older.
As is always the case with new diseases, identifying Patient Zero is next to impossible. The best I could do was trace him back to his first patient: Russell Crowe. One of his travel materials is sure to get into your social feed. Between this and last summer, Crowe seems to have developed a real obsession with Italy: scrolling through his Twitter profile, you lose track of how many times the actor asked his followers: “Where am I?”. On the hundredth similar content, we understand that the question is rhetorical and the answer is obvious: Crowe is still in Italy, probably a biopic about Father Amorta (exorcist of the Pope) only agreed to do so in order to have an excuse to spend three months with us during the off-season.
Very often he is in Rome, photographing the blue sky and the black silhouettes of the trees, contrasting with the orange background of the sunset. He sometimes travels, probably to avoid accusations of Romanocentrism: he travels to Venice to explain the origin of the Festa del Redentore, and to Messina to ask for clarification on the Fata Morgana phenomenon. With his group – Indoor Garden Party, probably founded for the sole purpose of touring Italy, extending the holiday period, expanding the route – he finds himself at the Magna Graecia film festival in Catanzaro or at the Orfeo summer festival in Tarentum. . The result is always the same: Calabria is a place “that the world should know” and Villa Peripato in Taranto is “damn cool”, we can imagine how he had a private conversation with the mayor of Catanzaro, Gianvito Casadonte, and was delighted with the taste of puccia with Bombolo birds, which can be enjoyed while enjoying the view of Mar Piccolo. But he himself admits that all roads eventually lead to Rome.
Love for the capital led Mayor Gualtieri to appoint Crowe as Rome’s ambassador to the world. The appointment the actor celebrated with what remains today his most surreal content: a video of him speeding through Villa Borghese on an electric scooter stops when he gets close enough to the video camera, says “good morning, good morning, good morning” and begins to explain what Villa Borghese is (first info: admission is free) with an accent, a stance, a 1950s Italian-American guaglio stance that contrasts alienatingly with his now-completed transformation into Giuliano Ferrara. Hashtags: #ambassadorRomanelMundo, perhaps for the algorithm to also push him into Spanish-language channels, expand his personal and tourist reach of Rome. Like a real ambassador to the world.
Studying the content of the new ambassador, I realized that a new disease gives rise to a new aesthetics. At least a new aesthetic for celebrities: no productive trappings or narrative fuss, and photos and videos from ordinary tourists on vacation in Italy, as it were Really were simple tourists on vacation in Italy. Perhaps this is the last phase of the process of de-aestheticization that began in social networks with the advent of TikTok and the evolution of the influencer species into creators: ugliness as a sign of sincerity. More: Truth. Perhaps this is the last stage of disintermediation after the fall of traditional media institutions: if there really is no separation between me and a celebrity, if Russell Crowe does use Twitter, as I do, then why be surprised that your Roman Holiday diary is so similar to mine?
For comparison purposes, I looked at two of my favorite Instagram profiles on the topic of celebrities, holidays and Italy: one is ItalianVice and the other is Celebs in Italy. I became aware of the diminishing presence or importance of the aesthetics that in the past dominated the storytelling of foreign celebrities who vacationed with us. Of course, the paparazzi still exist and will always be counted, but as far as we’re really interested is the photo of Justin and Hailey Bieber eating homemade ice cream in Florence surrounded by giant bodyguards in all black as we see Robert De Niro slashing his own mozzarella from Mimi alla Ferrovia in Naples? As far as the yuppie aesthetic can appeal to us today, the white polo shirt, dark jacket, ring on his finger and cigar in his mouth with which Arnold Schwarzenegger walked around Rome in 1988 in anticipation of participating in the Telegatti, when we can see Giancarlo Esposito, who in T – shirt, shorts, backpack and straw hat. Do you take a random photo in a random corner of Naples in front of a banner reminding you that “being a Neapolitan is great”?
Discussing this issue in the editorial, we said that the aesthetic of the ugly has always been part of the celebrity celebrity aesthetic in Italy. Testimonies hang on the walls of all the more ancient and old-fashioned trattorias, restaurants, pizzerias, temples dedicated to the pagan celebrity cult, the icons of which are framed photographs of the cook with Ron Moss (there is always a photo with Ron Moss). , in these places) or a restaurateur with Brigitte Nielsen (same speech as Moss). It’s true, but partly true: Celebrities were forced to embrace this aesthetic, their best performance under the circumstances consisting of an exaggerated—and therefore fake—smile or outright annoyance. On “Celebrity in Italy” there is a photo of Jennifer Lopez in a pizzeria in Capri, which with a rare and obvious discogliamento (we imagine a photo of Ben Affleck, who we understand was with her, but, we understand, was hidden from the camera) suitable for photography I remember with margherita pizza and local staff. If she took that photo again today, Lopez would probably be the one to go and piss off the staff to take one that clearly shows the live edge of the Neapolitan pizza so she can explain to followers how to recognize it. and distinguish it from imitation.
But the issue is not only aesthetic. As in all things of this era, identity, real or feigned, is important here. De Niro goes to Naples, eats Mimi’s puparuolo ‘mbuttunato and Conchettina i Tre Santi’s pizza, kisses the Maradona figurine and enthusiastically takes the little chick from Jenny Di Virgilio’s master’s bed, speaks Neapolitan and announces that he will shoot a film in Naples, because it is an “Italian song” (then he returns to his 108-meter Benetti yacht, moored nearby, because, unfortunately, all vacations end sooner or later). Esposito describes San Carlo in Naples as the place where the love between his father and mother began, with melodramatic captions such as “Tears in my eyes” and “This place is the home of my heart.” Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine receives honorary citizenship in Pratiglione, in the province of Turin where his great-great-grandfather was born, among blurry photographs of him displaying football team jerseys that I cannot recognize, posters announcing his arrival with a style announcing coming summer festival and mayors in tricolor ribbons making horns. Crowe is so committed to material attachment to Italy that he says he feels Italian because a member of his group bought a villa in Tropea, where in 1992, among other things, he went to shoot a film with Jennifer Beals, which then was not made for shady production schemes. Almost local.
“The fact that you are here is a life and a person,” one might say, quoting Whitman. But what kind of person is this? From this celebrity-created content emerges an ordinary postcard country, an exotic place, a folklore scene, a colorful neo-realism that really exists, however, only in the imagination of the American tourist, famous or not. And there is nothing less genuine, sincere, true than this identity, but what does a tourist know? And our fault, who knows: Magic Johnson was already fascinated by the grandeur of Positano lemons, the smell of which must have made him forget last year’s unpleasant episode when with Samuel L. Jackson he was mistaken for an immigrant who reveled in Forte dei Marmi in the face of an Italian worker, this experience of real Italy – and Michael Jordan can’t sit at a table in a restaurant without a guy with a mandolin arriving with a city band following him, make them improvise “In blue, dyed blue” (at the table with them was also Samuel L. Jackson, who, I believe, followed the scene with the muzzle of Major Marquis Warren of Hateful Eight), a scene reminiscent of this episode Soprano in which Uncle June begins to sing “Core ‘ngrato”, however rewritten by Quentin Tarantino and reworked by Robert Rodriguez.
“Italy is a gift from the gods that must be respected and honored,” one might say. quoting Crow (Russell). But let’s not be surprised if an American student comes to study in Florence for a year and is disappointed when she discovers that Italy is not the one she saw (even) in celebrity social networks. It’s their fault, of course. But also ours.