Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
108
suspected to invade the field of competence of other disciplines like sociology or political
science and the research methods of anthropology were considered to be inapplicable in this
case. Participant observation and in-depth case studies, however, proved to be fundamental
for an understanding of the élite’s interests, moralities and behaviours and their relationship
with the rest of the society. The combination of these field methods with the extensive study
of documents from public and private archives allowed Pardo to produce an ethnography that
clearly distinguishes itself from other studies of the élite.
In the early 1990s throughout Italy people’s trust in the political system was broken
by the great corruption scandal that has become known as
Tangentopoli
. The political
tempest washed away the principal political parties, with the exception of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) and the neo-Fascists. In 1993, Antonio Bassolino won the election
for mayor in Naples as candidate of the Democratic Party of the Left, one of the two
successor parties of the PCI. Under his leadership, the ‘ex’-Communists succeeded in staging
a ‘renaissance’ in Naples by means of a superficial face-lift of the city. They successfully
used public space to gain popular consensus and to consolidate their power. Shots of public
ceremonies and events on the central Piazza Plebiscito document their popularity, at the
beginning. As the years passed, these politicians did not keep their promises and residents’
trust in politics faded away once again. Pardo interviewed traders, shopkeepers and craftsmen
who had contributed to the urban renewal, whose efforts, however, had been ignored by those
in power. Entrepreneurs widely agree today that in that period local administrators ‘practiced
a sanctimonious, ideologically biased and deeply self-serving style of government at the
expense of the city and of its inhabitants’ (2012: 69). Once in power, the new political élite
worked hard at widening their power network, practicing clientelism. The ‘consultancies’ that
had been granted to thousands of so-called experts and intellectuals caused great controversy.
Naples’ leftist rulers justified the superimposition of their political project on ordinary
citizens on the basis of the stereotype of southern Italians as lazy and predisposed to
illegality. Moreover, they used this argument to criminalize the entrepreneurs who had
cooperated with the previous administration and to avoid paying for the work they had
performed under government contract. As on other occasions these illegitimate procedures
were legalized by
ad hoc
legislation. Pardo’s final assessment of the political élite that had
been in power in Naples for twenty-five years is withering: ‘administrative weakness,
bureaucratic inefficiency, expedient and selective policies and moral and criminal corruption
alongside manipulation of the law, expedient interference in the process of legislation and
