Paper short abstract:

Calcio Storico is the violent, athletic reenactment of a Florentine Renaissance game. For most participants, it currently constitutes a performative frame where breaking the spatial normativity instituted by the processes of heritagization and commodification of Florence’s historic center.

Paper long abstract:

Calcio Storico is the reenactment of a Florentine Renaissance game, “calcio”. Current celebrations comprise a Renaissance-costumes parade and a calcio tournament in the city center. In the tournament, four teams representing the “historic districts” of Florence confront in a radically violent ball game consisting of a composite set of contact and combat sports. From its “reinvention” in 1930, Calcio Storico has been representing a contested field for the expression of masculinity and “imagined” Florentine identities. In recent decades, the commodification of Florence’s iconic Historic Center has changed the social conformation of the city and forced residents to move to peripheral areas. In a bivalent way, many residents feel therefore proud of the popularity of the(ir) city center, and at the same time dispossessed of it – for it is mainly managed by the tourist industry. In these circumstances, Calcio Storico offers the people involved a bottom-up performative frame where contesting the dominant forms of territoriality that have both resulted in, and arose from, these processes of “heritagization” and commodification of the Historic Center. Through their extreme athletic gestures and iconoclastic bodies and behaviors, calcio players re-enact (an idealized version of) the Renaissance spirit of Florentine calcio, reclaiming their place in Florence’s history and territory. Concurrently, they break the spatial normativity instituted by the processes of heritagization and commodification of Florence and passionately resist what they feel like an “invasion” by the tourist market, that prevent them from living and enjoying the part of the city they recognize as their territory.