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Paper short abstract

The reenactment of Calcio Storico operates as a meta-historical dispositive where masculinities are performatively remade through risk, irreverence and intercorporeal trust. Shaped by displacement and heritage politics, "calcianti"’s bodies symbolically reclaim presence in an overtouristed Florence

Paper long abstract

Calcio Storico Fiorentino (CSF) is a re-enactment of the Renaissance game of “calcio”, specifically the “siege match” of 1530, when soldiers of the Republic of Florence played to mock the imperial troops besieging the city. Current celebrations consist of an extremely violent ball game held in the historic centre. Since its “reinvention” in 1930 with the support of local Fascist leaders, the festival has functioned as a script through which calcio players have expressed and redefined masculinity and “imagined” Florentine identities. In a historic centre reshaped by overtourism and neoliberal urban transformations, the CSF has become a site where participants symbolically reclaim presence in identitarian spaces from which they feel increasingly excluded by heritage politics.

The iconoclastic bodies of the players perform a dual movement: they affirm anachronistic masculinity while simultaneously expressing vulnerability and the desire for recognition within each team. By training together, calcianti collectively mould their bodies to embody the “Florentine” virtues of the “siege match” players. This produces a shared ethos – positioned in tension with the institutional apparatus of the CSF – in which risk, violence, irreverence, mutual support and intercorporeal trust become devices for shaping the self.

The CSF provides a “meta-historical frame” through which participants assert their presence in Florence’s history, cultivating a feared-yet-admired public persona and forging bodies that confer respectability and a sensual, unmentionably erotic visibility. Calcianti’s bodies operate therefore as ethnographic archives, shaped by displacement, precarity and the frictions of contemporary Florence, and central to the process of reworking masculinities.