What happened in Savona two days ago is a sad sign of the times: a dispute that degenerated into aggression between those queuing up at the Pawnshop in Savona.
The news tells of an old woman who, after a long wait, first went into a rage by kicking the windows of the agency, then argued with a couple over precedence issues and was punched in the back by them before walking away. Arrival of the police patrol and complaint. But beyond the news there is a “chronic” situation of hardship and poverty that becomes visible in the long queues that form in front of the Monte dei Pegni agency in Corso Tardy and Benech during the opening days.
The intervention
Franco Astengopolitical scientist and scholar of the Savonese society analyzes the episode in depth through this intervention that we publish in its entirety:
“The local newspapers headlined “Queues at the pawnshop, quarrel between customers, an old woman beaten”.
It happens in Savona, a small and quiet post-working-class provincial town, in economic and identity decline: above-average age (the province is the longest-lived in Italy), minimal immigration, long lines of closed shops, especially in the streets that connect the center to the periphery.
The Monte dei Pegni corresponds to the ancient Monte di Pietà where the poor “pawned” their few possessions in exchange for money useful for daily expenses; assets which they then tried to redeem months later with great effort and, sometimes, with the result of having them beaten at auction.
He pledged everything: in particular, in the classic form, linen or cutlery and crockery perhaps received as a wedding gift.
Back then “Il Monte” was located in the historic centre, in an ancestral palace which now houses an important museum: even at that time you could see the queues to deposit and redeem, part of an unforgettable human panorama.
Now we find ourselves beyond the stage of “buy gold”: we are in the sign of widespread poverty, perhaps lived with dignity by elderly people left alone, a “poverty of turned inside out jackets” as happened in a time whose memory seemed to have been forgotten. Stuff from the 50s, from that neorealism of which Andreotti, a great interpreter of the censorship of an Italy with a respectable facade, said “dirty laundry must be washed at home”.
All this is happening in the north of the country, on the eve of the Christmas glitter, surrounded by the emptiness of an alleged marine tourism, also in this case very facade in the mutual voracity of spending and accumulating on the part of the categories expressions of modernity of a corporatism well expressed by the recent political vote.
A city, Savona, with a rich middle class that has historically filled the banks without investing with entrepreneurs who came from abroad to launch the industry at the end of the 19th century.
A city, Savona, which really experienced the class struggle waged by what was defined as the “strong, stable, concentrated working class”, not even inclined towards the consumerism of the 60s.
A city in which inequalities continue to subtly grow, resulting in large voids especially in the “linear” nineteenth-century centre, modeled on Turin in the 1930s and 1940s and consequently on the Paris of the time: vacant and decaying apartments, facades ancient now worn out in a panorama where liberty jewels still appear alongside the invasion of concrete dating back to the frenzy of the years of the great deindustrialisation/building speculation exchange, whose most evident expression remains the boredom of being a crossing point for the cruise vanity fair.
The dispute in front of the Monte dei Pegni seems to be the emblem of a “pervasiveness” of decline. Goodwill administrators are trying to face this state of things above all by recovering some important historical containers and from there attempting to shape a new identity.
An attempt to be encouraged with confidence: however, the sensation of the ancient that grabs the new and tries to drag it back to the sad poverty of a distant time remains, while the memory remains of the chimneys from which the smoke of the blast furnaces came: where the Savona of the work”.