Let us take a few steps back and put everything in the context of Italian society as people from Grano see it. In the Introduction we saw that the società contadina (rural society) that characterised most parts of Salento up to 1950s underwent dramatic changes in just a couple of decades, mainly driven by the massive industrialisation in the north of Italy and central Europe. This imposed on Grano very precise ideals and cultural references generated by the increasingly prosperous north of the country. For example, older people remember how huge trailers carrying washing machines and plastic domestic goods flowed through the streets of Grano in the early 1960s, basically selling new and mod-ern ways to care for the home. At the same time the entertainment industry had grown spectacularly and had come to be dominated by the glamorous world of Rome, especially in the cinema, which expressed both refined and popular tastes.5
The roots of the cultural obsession and norms for bellezza can be traced way back in time, for example, to the Middle Ages, when in the fine arts it was seen as a divine attribute. This was associated gradually with femininity and had an important role in matrimonial exchange.6 Hundreds of years later, in the late 1970s, many Italians started to see the model for bellezza as emerging in the city of Milan. Any middle- aged women in Grano remembers that if their mother had beauty standards set by famous actresses, such as Serena Grandi, Laura Antonelli or Gloria Guida, who were all associated with Rome, in the 1980s and early 1990s they themselves grew up with a completely different kind of beauty, more glamorous than that appreciated by the previous generation.7
In the 1980s and 1990s the fashion industry flourished in the north of Italy, and models such as Cindy Crawford and Yasmin Le Bon who worked mainly in Milan, marked a profound professionalisation and interna-tionalisation of beauty.8 The new kind of beauty was more tangible and tailored than the bellezza classica (‘classic beauty’) of the previous decades, which for most people had been limited to distant admiration.
However, as before, it was aimed mostly at women.
These new qualities of bellezza were the result of a spectacu-lar increase in diversification of goods and services related to beauty.
Media and mass consumption proposed a popular engagement with the idea of beauty, style and glamour: virtually everyone could afford to beautify themselves. The sudden rise of modelle (models) in the 1970s corresponded to the spectacular take- off of the moda Italiana (Italian fashion) and il stilo Italiano (the Italian style). Famous fashion houses such as Versace were trading with great success in New York and else-where.9 Even if innumerable small workshops from various regions in Italy participated with materials, knowledge and work, for most people the fashion industry was synonymous with Milan. Even today, Milan remains, for southern Salento, a model not only of economic success but also of desirability.
This rapid development of fashion and style can be seen as a secu-lar response to the Catholic aim for a beautiful Christian life and being a good person. It came on a wave of optimism, affluence and mass- consumption, and corresponded with a major shift in public attention from Rome and the Vatican, representing the pillars of a united Italian state, to Milan as the locus of economic success. As Italian commen-tators noted, the economic and public success of Silvio Berlusconi is related, among other things, to the fact that he successfully surfed this wave of popular enthusiasm.10 In particular, the media giant owned by Berlusconi made innovations in the entertainment industry by placing an essential focus on stereotyping and promoting a particular kind of feminine beauty. The most popular television shows such as Striscia la Notizia11 (Strip the News) and Non è la RAI12 (It is not RAI) pushed the veline (television showgirls) not only as a mass consumption product at the heart of the Italian celebrity culture, but also as a lifestyle model for generations of female teenagers.13 Even if this was vehemently crit-icised in Italian society as misogynistic and degrading, many women in Grano in their mid-thirties remember how they grew up dreaming of becoming such media celebrities. This could also relate to the aim of popular television to drive bourgeois tastes and subjects into popular audiences.14
However, the Italian fashion industry started to lose ground less than two decades after its inception. Especially after the economic crisis of 2008, the business market and policy makers started to rally around the famous qualità Italiana (Italian quality) as a distinguishing mark of national style. Domains that used to be outstanding, such as the arts, design and craft, were invoked as supreme proof of Italian excellence.
In this context, different versions of ‘beauty’ seemed to carry a new bur-den: the responsibility to represent those things that both Italian media and its audience agreed still existed in abundance: the beauty of the Italian land- and seascape, cities, art and history, or the quality and aes-thetics of the different regional traditions and cuisines. All along, the physical beauty of the people accompanied in different ways the praise given to genuine Italian quality. For example, major motor and football shows were presented by young attractive models or celebrities, who in contrast to veline were seen as less superficial, more expert and wear-ing more decent clothes. In a successful show on RAI2 (a major channel on the national television network), young female hostesses presented powerful new cars by driving them in spectacular Italian holiday resorts, such as snow- covered chalet resorts in the Alps or exclusive sea resorts.
The various kinds of beauty that Italians agreed on were packaged into an attractive format for a popular audience.
There is a powerful critique of the current decline in the ‘authen-tic’ values of beauty in the successful Italian film, La Grande Bellezza (‘The Great Beauty’). In Grano this film, which juxtaposes the decay-ing of the majestic beauty of Rome with the meanness of Rome’s hypo-critical, high- class inhabitants striving for ephemeral values, including false beauty, appealed to most people, and especially to the highly edu-cated and those who had lived in Rome for a period. When the film was screened on national television in the winter of 2014, just after it had won an Oscar for the best foreign language picture, everybody in town watched it compulsively. The streets were emptier than usual and some bars screened it on their big screens, where only music and football are normally played. In the days that followed, the film was discussed inten-sively in families, between friends and in the local media in a similar way that the San Remo Festival is usually discussed every year. Many views can be summarised in the indignation expressed by one women in her forties: ‘We [Italians] have so much beauty, and Rome is bellissima (extremely beautiful), but what are we doing with it!?’ She continued that human beauty should be about truthfulness and honesty, even if the person looks old or unfashionable, that it is as if nature is teaching us a lesson that we should not ignore. In her view, only natural beauty
can now match the majesty of the many impressive constructions that humankind used to erect.
Later in the year, the theme of the 2014 San Remo festival was
‘beauty’. The impressive set design was inspired by the film La Grande Bellezza, with a massive mock eighteenth- century castle,15 ‘just appar-ently abandoned, in which harmony, elegance, and memories of distant splendour still exist’.16 RAI News commented bitterly that it was: ‘a met-aphor for the country’. The television celebrity and co- presenter of the festival Fabio Fazio explained: ‘Great beauty for us Italians is a neces-sity, it gives importance to what we are.’17 In a monologue given at the festival by the popular actress Luciana Littizzetto, she addressed many issues relating to beauty and diversity, including a plea for a return to
‘normality’, and she derided those women who are obsessed with beauty, dedicating themselves to ‘stirring, shaving and suction’.18 Her words were welcomed with frenetic applause and unanimous approval in the media, which appreciated her attempt to restore feminine beauty as represented by the natural and the genuine.
Nonetheless, if important segments of current Italian society are trying to find a way back to celebrating natural beauty, for many people in Grano external beauty is something that can be achieved through reg-ular effort and care, and stylish accessories. Thus people with incomes well under the average will save up to buy expensive branded bags, jeans, sport shoes and sunglasses, and will go regularly to the gym and their hairdresser. One young adult woman who had just separated from her husband told me that she had a few wardrobes full of branded bags.
Her husband used to give them to her as a gift after each major domestic fight. She told me sadly: ‘I would have preferred him to love me instead.
I did not need those bags. I never really liked them.’19