Utopia and Dystopia in Narratives about Tuscany

This chapter scrutinizes dominant narratives about Tuscany, showing their class and historical roots. The city, the country, and the periphery are identified as three abstract spaces (in the meaning used by Lefebvre), whose largely artificial images stress some of their features while sitting on others. This tripartition of Tuscany implies in fact a binary opposition between the country and the city on the one hand, and the periphery on the other. The museumized and purified image of the first two is tied to a generic a-historic past; the periphery instead is a sort of anti-Tuscany, housing what can no more be lodged elsewhere. Such narratives created a simulacrum of Tuscany which tends to replace reality. Dystopic Tuscany is the product of frictions produced by that replacement. It is a complex social and material world that doesn’t lend itself to encapsulation and is very often represented as undesirable by dominant narratives. Such a way of conceiving the territory is the result of a longstanding process of cultural production, started in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Tuscan land aristocracy and by the conspicuous English-speaking community of Florence. It was further developed under fascism as a consequence of its anti-urban and pro-rural ideology. This conceptualization heavily shapes urban and regional policies today, turning the Tuscan myth into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. In the mind of Tuscan policymakers, the ‘good’ city is still the old city, compact and neatly separate from the country. However, the center of Florence increasingly resembles a theme-park, an enclave of touristic consumerism, and the Tuscan country looks like a place where time has been frozen and space has been flattened to a purified a-historical dimension, tailored to the needs of wealthy international vacationers. In contrast, the ordinary spaces of the outskirts are becoming the most socially interesting and lively part of the region. Deconstructing the Tuscan myth and understanding its normative and ideological nature is a precondition to achieving more balanced policies and a more balanced development in Tuscany.