Research Seminar in Cultural Anthropology: “Steel, Raffo and mussels” States of imagination, promises of reindustrialisation and dreams of touristification in Taranto (Southern Italy).

In this talk, Letizia Bonanno examines how possible futures are imagined, governed and contested in Taranto, a southern Italian port city home to one of Europe’s largest and most polluting steel plants (ex-ILVA). Treating steel, Raffo (the local beer) and mussels as emblems of industrial labour, everyday sociality and dreams of touristification, she explores how Tarantini try to envision possible futures beyond the factory and after industrial labour. In this context, tourism becomes central to discourses of green transition and the valorisation of food, classic heritage and coastal landscapes as the main economic drive of the city. Civil society mobilises these imaginaries to challenge state narratives that continue to cast reindustrialisation as Taranto’s economic destiny. Thus, she argues, the state’s promises of reindustrialisation and Tarantini’s dreams of touristification function less as material transformations than as conflicting imaginative and affective horizons where possible futures are continuously promised, postponed and unevenly distributed.

Short bio:

Letizia Bonanno holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She has recently begun her new research project “Imagining the future in post-industrial Taranto.” This presentation is based on her preliminary fieldwork she carried out in Summer 2025, with the support of the Wenner-Gren Post-PhD Research Grant.