IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

La Passeggiata is not unique to Siena or even to Italy. The ritual of an early evening walk to get some air, to greet neighbors and friends, to strut one’s finery and check out the finery of others, appears in many cultures. Siena, however, as a UNESCO Heritage site and a recent favorite of travel writers who seek to promote “undiscovered” experiences such as Siena’s Palio (inadequately described by outside observers as a “festival” around a horserace), performs its passeggiata almost invisibly to the tourists who rush by on their way to restaurants and shops. The passeggiata requires an intention to linger as opposed to an intention to get somewhere, and this intentionality acknowledges a cultural intimacy in the shared space of a pedestrian street. Jane Jacobs coined the phrase the “ballet of the sidewalk” to describe the streets of New York in the 1960s. This paper explores the choreography of bodies on il corso, a local term for the medieval main street where Siena’s daily rituals of identity and belonging operate in resistance to the necessary menace of tourism. I argue that the intimacy of Siena’s passeggiata is not, however, only a performance of the present and the living; it is also a recognition of the past and the absent, a conscious engagement with the city’s centuries of social survival in the face of plagues and political upheavals. In the face of Covid-19 and the increase of virtual communities, Siena’s passeggiata endures because of that consciousness of earlier losses.