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| Porta San Frediano, Firenze |
Pierluca Birindelli
Last week many international newspapers
and almost all the major Italian ones published the following “news”: San Frediano
(Firenze) is the “coolest” neighbourhood of the world. Who said that? Lonely
Planet: “10of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods to visit right now”. And who said that to the Lonely Planet?
Georgette Jupe. Period.
Georgette Jupe
keeps a blog with a Vespa as a logo: “Girl
in Florence”. In a certain sense, a Vespa must
be in the Italian portrait, see the post “There Must be a Vespa” in my personal blog. “Vespa” is indeed a very dear cultural object
for the Italians. But discussing the differences between local and global
meanings would take us too far. Here I would like to touch just one point about
touristic guides: the “worth canon.”
The social
discourse clearly pre- and per-forms an attitude towards the construction of
the experience agenda. We can detect a travelling criterion moulded on the
canon of “worthiness.” Roland Barthes described the Blu-Hachette guides
(comparable to today’s Lonely Planet) as fetish objects of contemporary
tourism. The tourist is led by the guide to places where it is “worth going.”
The “worth” canon, according to Barthes, makes all trips, at least
structurally, standardised.
Still following
Roland Barthes’ Mythologies,
“identification” is one of the key figures of the rhetoric of myth regarding
other people and cultures. The identification process reveals the inability to
imagine the Other; in the experience of confrontation otherness is thus reduced
to sameness. In short: the foreigner projects his/her images (acquired through
the media and the ongoing social discourse) on the other. The recognition
dialectic is therefore blocked, crystallized around a number of stereotypes.
Sometimes, when the Other cannot (because the vividness of the reality is
enormously incoherent with the myth) or refuses to be reduced, a rhetorical
figure comes to the aid in such an emergency: exoticism ‒ “The Other becomes a pure object,
a spectacle, a clown” (Barthes, 1972 [1957]: 152).
References
Barthes, R. (1972 [1957]) Mythologies.
New York: Hill and Wang.
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