Pino Corrias: The too much of Malamovida

This article by Pino Corrias is published in the number 28-29 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 18 July 2023

The silent Covid deserts gone forever (or for now), the multiple constellation of the spritz rises at every sunset. Out-of-the-box boys and girls from the suburbs gather under the dating lights. Increase the volume of Sfera Ebbasta, MamboLosco, Tony Effe. The rumba begins under the sky of the bars, goes out to fill the streets with alcoholic laughter, overflows up to the square. Around midnight in corso Como in Milan, in piazza Trilussa in Rome, in via Chiaia in Naples, in the alleys of Casteddu in Cagliari – not to mention on the seafronts of Rimini & Riccione – it becomes hail and floods. The inks of the municipal administrations measure the damage in their own way, they call it: «Excessive anthropic pressure on individual portions of the territory». Which doesn’t make the idea at all.

The idea of ​​the siege comes from the local newspapers which are screaming the alarm. And especially the residents who chew their coronaries and sleep. Surrounded as they are by the cheering crowd of night-goers, by couples making toasts, by tour companies, by traffic jams that cause smog, by drug dealers who go blind buff. From warriors who brawl and ambush. It is called «Malamovida». Turn entire neighborhoods into an acoustic hell. It explodes from the end of school onwards, doubles in the months of holidays, that is now, reaches the coasts and climbs the mountains, becomes a backwash of torments for the communities of citizens surrounded. A nightmare that can even be fun to stay in, depending on age, on stupefaction, but which is generating widespread revolts with queues of quarrels and lawyers.

The forerunner was the Brescia court, which at the end of May sentenced the Municipality to compensate a couple who “couldn’t sleep anymore, due to noise”, with fifty thousand euros of biological and psychophysical damages. Easy, you say. Not much, it took a ten-year trial, one hundred witnesses, three sentences. The uproar of the sentence has set in motion other gears: in Turin a class action by 29 families has asked for 1.2 million euros in damages from the Municipality. AND about fifty Committees – from North to South – are declaring war on their respective administrations that are unable or unwilling to impose nocturnal silence. The mayors woke up with a start. Patrols of “night stewards” have appeared in Verona and Florence, trying to calm down the gin and tonic fans, the screamers, the bartenders who forget the closing time. We are in the neighborhood treated as a stadium, with mass rituals controlled by people counters and television cameras, awaiting new rules for too many lit bars, for too many tourists on the march.

In his day, Giorgio Manganelli complained of too much. He spoke of too much money going around, of too much consumption that suffocates. The malamovida is too much of everything. Including rudeness, of course. But also including the huge amount of social silencewhich out of nemesis and boredom turns into its very loud opposite.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.