5 - The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Ladder of Power: Local Politics and Society in Italy

Summary

Introduction

Disasters are both events that mirror pre-existing social relationships (individual and collective statuses, positions, different types of exposition to power, cultural and political tics and so on) and ‘runways’, utilized by different actors to achieve old and new goals. Frequently, during these phases social and political processes become faster. Moreover, after an initial period of shock, which is also the moment during which different responsibilities and powers are assigned, and opportunities and chances are identified, the drama turns to be a performative time. That is, the moment during which political actors put into action different self-representations – from efficiency to care – that match their reading of the popular sentiments of the day. To these observations it should be added that undesired events, including pandemics, can be read as events posed at the crossroad of novelty and continuation. New elements (such as regulations, social hierarchies and so on) mingle with forces, structures and ideologies that pre-existed and that were perhaps overlooked during the phases preceding disasters. Therefore, these latter events limit themselves to make tangible what was somehow hidden or neglected; but that was already shaping the contours of reality – that is, the structure, the culture, and the ideologies of societies and places. In this latter respect, in a past work (Farinella and Saitta, 2019) I have already observed that public memory – that is, the circulation of popular recollections that entail what is remembered by the communities and how it is framed (Houdek and Phillips, 2017) – helps such understanding of disasters. Borrowing from other classic cases, one can for example notice that the Chicago Great Fire of 1871 took place within the framework of an ascending economy, and this collective experience has been seen through the lens of the myth of creative destruction. For the collective memory, from the Great Fire, the city resurrected stronger than before (Sawislak, 1995). The same is true for San Francisco less than a decade after the 1906 earthquake (Dyl, 2017, p 263). The common element between these two cases is that, prior to the different disasters that hit them, both cities were in an expansion phase. On the contrary, at the onset of the twentieth century, Messina, the city at the centre of this chapter, presented a strong but declining economy (Battaglia, 2003, p 63 passim).