The Italian Quartet

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

My Parents, Oceanside, California

THE ITALIAN QUARTET

In this reflection, I will tell you how and why I came to take the photos in the four galleries titled "Imagining Italy," "Revisiting Rome," "Staging Emilia-Romagna" and "Consuming Milan." The images explore what Professor Raoul Bianchi, who studies the political economy of tourism from a Marxist perspective, refers to as the "tourism-real estate regime of accumulation." Over the last half century this regime of accumulation has been central to the spatial dynamics of global capitalism.

In light of their common theme, I am going to gather these galleries together and write about them under the heading "The Italian Quartet," with apologies to Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan Quartet should be required reading for any tourist going to Italy, or going anywhere for that matter. The Neapolitan narrator and protagonist of the novels is a tourist in her own country, unable to crack the many languages that are spoken at home, on the streets and in professional settings, and equally unable to decode the many cultural scripts that others seem to read from instinctively. All you tourists out there will recognize this sense of being out of place.

This reflection is divided into three parts. In the first, I will explain my reasons for wanting to leave the United States in 2019. They were quite ordinary reasons and should be familiar to all of you. I had burned out trying to manage the basic stuff of life, such as caring for my aging parents and witnessing their physical and mental deterioration. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” says Philip Roth's narrator in Everyman. I wanted to escape from the site of the massacre, at least for a month or so. Not long after Mom and Dad died, I boarded a trans-Atlantic flight departing from Atlanta. Simple as that.

In the second part of the reflection, I will explain how I ended up in Italy rather than somewhere else. To my burned-out way of thinking Italy seemed like a no-brainer, a place known for its joyful and passionate way of life, where I might clear my head and recharge my batteries. What did I actually know about the country beyond stereotypes of la dolce vita? In truth, not much. But what I lacked in first-hand experience and book knowledge was more than made up for by the very powerful impressions of Italy I had formed in Catholic elementary school and, later, at the movie theater. These impressions were reinforced by my sexual and political awakening during the 1960s. The psychology of Italian tourism had been percolating in my unconscious mind for a long time, which I did not discover until I sat down to write what you are now reading.

The third part of the reflection explains why I felt the need to revisit Italy in 2024. While I wouldn't go so far as to call this second trip a mulligan, it seemed to me that I had missed something important the first time around, owing to the escapist impulse and unconscious drives which sent me to Italy. During the five-year interlude separating these two trips, I made a deep dive into Marxism, so that when I arrived in Rome the second time, it was with a clearer understanding of what exactly I was looking for. I had a theory and a set of concepts which would help me see the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation as it actually operates on the ground. See it and photograph it, because you can't photograph what you don't see. The updated version of me who disembarked at Leonardo da Vinci Rome Fiumicino Airport in 2024 had a better grasp of not only the spatial dynamics of capitalism but also what it means to be a documentary photographer working on the street.

I. THE GREAT ESCAPE

In October 2019, my wife Allyson and I boarded a flight from Atlanta to London with a connection to Rome. From there we would go by train and boat to Naples, Sorrento and Capri. We had both retired the previous year after long careers in teaching. What better way to celebrate our rebirth as state pensioners than a trip to Italy? We had spent a glorious week in Rome and Florence during the 1980s, and loved loved every minute of it. Reminiscing about that trip and how impossibly young we were, tallying up all the things that had changed and changed us during our nearly forty years of marriage—well, Italy beckoned like a class reunion. Our only child had tied the knot in August. Our new daughter-in-law checked off all the boxes. We were empty nesters. Time to pack up and go. Ciao!

But there were other, less joyful reasons for wanting to get away. The years leading up to our departure had been difficult for me and my family. In 2017 the city of Atlanta shut down a homeless shelter in whose operations I was deeply involved. This was a bitter defeat for the shelter's residents and for housing advocates throughout the city. When the hammer finally came down, I was serving as chair of the board of directors which ran the shelter, so I took the defeat personally. Not a day goes by that I don't ask myself whether decisions I made as board chair played into the hands of our foes and sealed our fate. You'll learn more about this in "The Atlanta Quartet."

Not long after the shelter defeat, my parents died, Dad in August 2019 and Mom three weeks later. By the end they were couple of sputtering candles extinguished by a whisper. Their deaths gave me one more more reason to second-guess all the things I might have done differently. Could I have been a better son? Would it have made any difference? The experts tell us that self-doubt is a part of the grieving process. I'm inclined to agree.

It's time for me to introduce you to the couple in the photo above, taken twelve years before they died. It's reading time at the dining room table. Dad has his signature cup of black coffee. Mom is keeping her ever-watchful eye on the world that revolved around her husband.

They seemed to have been dying for as long as I could remember. The first signs of Mom's descent into Alzheimer’s appeared not long after I took the picture you see here. I wonder now if she could read what she is looking at so intently or if she is just content to share a quiet moment with the husband at her side and the son across the table. Once ensconced in the nursing home, she rapidly lost the ability to walk and speak, feed and clean herself. A "vegetable" by the end, to put it bluntly. An angel brigade of underpaid women from Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines cared for her.

My father was a physician. He was strong, sharp and still practicing his specialty of dermatopathology when he decided to put Mom in a nursing home. This was in 2013. He sold their house and practically everything in it. Then my impulsive father, who was quite the fashion plate in his heyday, tossed his entire wardrobe into a dumpster, right down to his last pair of socks and his eye-popping collection of bikini briefs (another signature accessory of my old man). When my parents left the last house they would ever own, on Fire Mountain in Oceanside, California, they didn't take much more than the clothes on their backs.

If it had been anyone else, I would have chalked up such behavior to shock and grief. After all, here was a man beginning the process of saying goodbye to his companion of sixty-eight years. But there was method to his madness. Dad subscribed to the doctrine that the best way of dealing with life's ups and downs was to make a decision and never, ever look back. As a kid growing up, I had watched him make clean breaks of this sort many times.

When I was old enough to see my parents not as abstract, sometimes dangerous forces of nature but as two flesh-and-blood people doing the best they could with what they had, I attributed Dad's no-bullshit philosophy of life to his historical moment: he was a child of the Depression, a World War II Navy vet and a beneficiary of the postwar "golden age of capitalism" which created seemingly endless opportunities for self-invention in the sprawling Southern California suburbs where he started his family and I grew up.

I had an edgy relationship with my father, balanced precariously between respect and love on one side and hair-trigger male ego on the other (the trigger was mostly mine, I must confess). On one memorable, alcohol-fueled night when my mother was not present to keep the peace, I mouthed off to Dad about the so-called Greatest Generation and its hypocritical sense of white entitlement. He hit me across the chin with a kitchen bar stool. There was a lot of blood. I remember him saying a few seconds later, "Charlie, this is something you'll never forget." He was right about that. When the air cleared and we sobered up, the old man drove me down to his office a few blocks away and stitched up my face so that I would look half-way presentable at my brother Mike's wedding the next day.

Looking back on it, I believe what really stung him was my insinuation that he had gotten a handout, a gift he hadn't really earned and maybe didn't deserve. My father believed deep down in his bones that he had worked hard for everything he had, unlike a lot of other men who depended on handouts, his handouts in particular. Did these freeloaders include his four sons? Did they include me? From the time I was a teenager this question hung in the air like the pungent smell of a men's locker room whenever we were together.

It was Mike who phoned to tell me about Dad and the dumpster. I don't remember being overly concerned. The old man's okay, I told myself. He just needs a little time and space to adjust to the new reality.

As part of this adjustment, Dad did something remarkable, even redemptive. Not for the first or last time in my life did I realize how much I underestimated his nobility of character, if that's not too melodramatic a way of putting it. Say what you will about him, I told myself, the SOB did look after his own. You see, my father wasn't yet ready to let go of his wife, nor would he ever be. He found a nearby memory-care facility with an available two-bedroom apartment, and made some inquiries. Guess what? It turned out that the management had no objection, none at all, to collecting double rent from an Alzheimer's patient and her high-functioning, low-maintenance eighty-six-year old soul mate.

Dad moved into memory-care with Mom.

Surrounded on all sides by cognitive decay and disrepair, and separated from the outside world by a heavy door that locked automatically to keep patients like my mother from wandering off, Dad soldiered on. He set up his computer and microscope on a desk in his bedroom, and operated his medical practice from there.

The car keys were his best friend. Every other Saturday, Dad fired up his Toyota and drove from Oceanside to his former clinic in Palm Desert to read slides for his colleagues performing Mohs surgery. Two hours there, two hours back. A brutal commute, even for an alert and cautious driver. But alert and cautious were the last words anyone would use to describe my father when he got behind the wheel. This hearing-impaired octogenarian was never happier than when he was playing Puccini's La Bohème at full blast on the car stereo while belting out "Che gelida manina" in his best Italian. With Dad at the helm, the Toyota was a bel canto missile streaking across the hills, shrublands and desert wastes of his beloved Southern California.

We tried to convince him to surrender the car keys. Not a chance. Each time I came out to see my parents, the Toyota sported a new coat of dents, scratches and dangling sideview mirrors. It started looking more and more like the cut-up heavyweight prizefighter Jerry Quarry after his 1970 showdown with the then Cassius Clay. The Toyota was starting to look a little like me after my kitchen showdown with Dad in 1977.

But that was my old man. Speed demon and opera lover. Hardhead and healer.

Four years later came the massive stroke that grounded Dad for good. He now joined his wife on the receiving end of the healing arts. No more reading slides or running errands to fetch adult diapers for Mom. No more daily workouts at his gym. No more morning walks on Carlsbad Beach. No more quiet time sitting on his favorite park bench which offered panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. On that bench, he seemed truly at peace with himself, a copy of the LA Times in one hand and a cup of bad coffee in the other, both courtesy of the local 7-Eleven on Carlsbad Drive.

The two love birds now shared a perch in a skilled-nursing ward, nested in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. The facility was located in Eagle Rock, not far from downtown LA, where Barack Obama went to college and started his campaign for the presidency. My folks slept in identical hospital beds, separated by a few feet.

Mom had no idea where she was, as best I could tell. (I said she was a vegetable, but how can you know for sure?) As for Dad, he was often in panic mode after the stroke, thinking he had misplaced his wife somewhere, on a street corner he vaguely remembered or in the booth of one of their favorite restaurants.

“Where’s your mother? I can’t find her.”

“She’s right here, Dad, in the next bed. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”

That’s the way things were at the end. “Mush brain” is how my father sometimes described his crippled mental state. In these lucid moments, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, his black Irish humor flashed its teeth.

I have three brothers who live in California (no sisters), two in LA and one in the Bay area. We divided up the job of monitoring our parents during their final days. Brother Mark was on point. Brother Dan was on call in case of an emergency. Brother Mike continued to oversee our parents' financial and legal affairs. After the stroke, I did my bit by catching a flight from Atlanta to LA every other month. My home away from home was a Comfort Inn on Colorado Boulevard, close to the nursing home, where I'd spend a week powwowing with the brothers and visiting my parents. Visiting is a euphemism. Holding vigil is more like it. The angels fed Mom her lunch and dinner, I fed Dad.

Their bodies were cremated and their ashes entombed in a cemetery wall at San Luis Rey de Francia, one of the original Spanish missions in California. San Luis Rey is a lovely spot located a few miles from my parents' last home. It is also an active community of Franciscan friars. The church and grounds are seeded with San Damiano crosses in honor of the order's founder, Francis of Assisi, who is everyone's first-ballot Hall of Fame favorite saint. I'm looking at one such cross right now, which hangs in my home study. I purchased it at the mission gift shop on my most recent visit. Not sure when, or if, I'll return. Allyson says, "You'll be back."

II. WHY ITALY?

As my parents neared the end, all I could think about was activating the escape hatch and rocketing off to some distant galaxy at the edge of the universe where homelessness and death were unknown, and joy was in abundance. Or if not a distant galaxy, then a pleasant destination known for its zesty way of life. I am sure that there is a long list of places that fit the bill and would welcome me with open arms. But I had my heart set on just one of them, Italy. Why?

While Allyson and I had certainly enjoyed our time there in the 1980s, my formal knowledge about the country was very limited, and still is. I never took a class in Italian history, culture and art when I was in college or graduate school, and have no plans to take one at the nearby continuing education center where the retired lifelong learners seek out each other's company. I didn't speak Italian in 2019, and still don't. What little I knew about Italian current events came from the morning paper, which remains my go-to source for whatever shenanigans Prime Minister Meloni and her neo-fascist followers are up to these days. In all these respects, I was a typical American tourist, what Mark Twain called an "innocent abroad."

Even so, my head swarmed with images of Italy as Allyson and I prepared for our departure, and which for me were as true to life and brilliantly rendered as any painting by Raphael (more on him in a second).

How did these Italian associations burrow their way into my imagination? The short answer is sex and religion; the longer answer is sex, religion, art, beauty and politics. Let me try to connect these dots.

I am the product of an early Catholic education, a former altar boy who rose to the rank of Knight Commander at Sacred Heart School in Covina, California, which I attended from the 5th through the 8th grade, after spending the first couple of years at St. Christopher Parish School about three miles away. Latin, the language of Cicero, was something I didn't understand but felt entirely at home with, having had to learn the liturgy and memorize my lines as an altar boy.

You shouldn't be overly impressed by my fancy title. I was far down in the pecking order, a lowly serf compared to Rudi Brutocao, the Supreme Grand Knight who was our leader, chosen by his fellow altar boys in a fair and honest election. Rudi's family originally came from Italy, mine from Ireland, Germany France and God knows where else. But rank and ethnicity didn't matter. Rudi and I shared something more basic, more meaningful: we were Knights among Knights. The brotherhood of altar boys was my initiation into the world of men, a world of interlocking hierarchies and hellscapes, secrets and solidarities.

Sacred Heart students were expected to attend Mass before the school bell rang. The boys sat on the right side of the church, the girls on the left. We were also sorted out by grade-level, with the 8th graders occupying the front pews and the lower grades organized in rank-order behind them. This meant that five days a week, as I settled into my assigned pew, my head would automatically swivel 90 degrees leftward to scan my female classmates, arrayed on the other side of the central aisle like a carton of Easter eggs, all identical in their school uniforms but each girl, in my view, a breathtakingly singular creation. To make matters worse, or at any rate more distracting, the more I sat at attention and tried to keep my eyes on the priest officiating the Mass, the more they were drawn to the two statues flanking the main altar. They were of a lovely girl on the threshold of womanhood, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Even when I was seated at my desk in school my eyes could feast on the Virgin's mechanically reproduced likeness, thanks to holy cards distributed by my teachers, most notably Sister Mary Perpetua in the 5th grade and Sister Mary Reparata in the 8th. These were a reward given to "good" boys who behaved themselves. Holy cards featured pictures of the saints and Holy Family on one side, and devotional prayers on the other. For me they opened a door to the glories of Italian Renaissance art and of the female form, which I was beginning to suspect were one and the same. Holy cards gave me my first glimpse of Raphael's Madonnas whose warm, rounded and flushed faces were sometimes turned to the baby Jesus and sometimes to the viewer, that is to say, turned to me. In these faces from the 16th century, the mysteries of divine love took the form of a gentle girl not much older than myself.

What I am trying to say is that Italy was present at the birth of my sexual self through the rituals, symbolism and art of the Roman Catholic Church.

When my paternal grandfather died in 1966, my family left the Church and I stopped attending Catholic school. I can remember the Sunday Mass at which Father Collins, a short-tempered Irishman with the biggest pair of hands I had ever seen, mounted the pulpit to inform the congregation of my grandfather's passing. Gramps went to Mass every morning, which made him a familiar figure at Sacred Heart. At one point all four Steffen boys were enrolled at the school. As Gramps shuffled his way down the side aisle at the end of morning Mass (we students were required to remain seated until the old folks had left), he waved to each of us and we waved back in rank-order, like soldiers returning a salute. I was serving Mass on the day of Father Collins's announcement and wondered if he knew that one of his altar boys was the deceased's grandson. It never occurred to me to tell the priest who I was. We altar boys had a kind of pact: the less Father Collins knew about us, the better for all concerned.

Enrolling in a public high school a few months later may have severed my connection with the Church but not with Italy, which continued to poke and prod my imagination by bombarding it with more images of sex and religion. The movie theater would become my new house of worship, and remains so today.

Two Italian movies made an especially deep impression on me: Vittorio de Sica's Marriage Italian Style (1964) and Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963). They both premiered during the tumultuous decade of the Sixties which happened to coincide with my full-blooded transition to adulthood. I was eager to engage seriously with the world, both sexually and politically.

The female iconography I had absorbed at Sacred Heart proved to be a wonderful preparation for Italian cinema, enabling me to make an instant connection with the narrative structure, thematic content, religious symbology and supersaturated eroticism of Marriage Italian Style and 8 1/2. I understood them in ways that would have been impossible had Knighthood, the Blessed Virgin, Sisters Mary Perpetua & Reparata, holy cards, Father Collins and Raphael not been implanted in my adolescent brain between the ages of eleven and fourteen. To put it another way, it was as if De Sica and Fellini picked up the story of sex and religion, gender and power, art and beauty, where my Sacred Heart education had left off. And by some strange intuition that I wouldn't have been able to explain then and am struggling to explain now, I knew that this was an Italian story.

In Marriage Italian Style, Marcello Mastroianni plays the part of Domenico Soriano, a Neapolitan playboy and heir to old wealth. His leading lady is Sophia Loren as Filumena Marturano, a young prostitute who leaves the bordello to become his long suffering mistress. This was the movie in which I first encountered the woman, 18 years my senior, who would forever after define female sexuality in my dreams and fantasies. In the years since that encounter, she has aged as I have aged without ever losing a scintilla of her sensuality and allure.

I recently streamed Marriage again, looking forward to the scene in which Filumena, aged around twenty, sashays down a Neapolitan sidewalk on her way to meet Domenico. She is like a Chris-Craft motor boat skimming across the surface of the water as a trail of bedazzled pedestrians forms in her wake. She's magnificent, radiant! And so Filumena remains throughout the movie even as she metamorphoses into a forty-something woman with sunken eyes, bare lips and unkempt hair. When she finally confronts Domenico, demanding marriage in compensation for the twenty years of drudgery and humiliation she has endured in his service as lover and maid, her fire and passion are as intense as ever, giving Filumena's beauty a hard edge that is, well, irresistible. Domenico can't resist it, and so the couple reconciles and the movie ends with their passionate embrace. Nor could the Hollywood establishment resist it : Sophia Loren's performance earned her a nomination for the Best Actress Academy Award in 1964.

When Allyson and I came across Sophia's poster image at a sidewalk café on the Via Santa Maria di Constantinople in Naples, not far from where the movie was filmed fifty-six years earlier, I took a picture of the picture I had been carrying around in my head since I was a teenager ("Imagining Italy," Photo 51). Can you blame me?

In 8 1/2, Fellini weaves a story around the same two themes that De Sica use in his movie: the power of the male gaze and the counterpower of female resistance. Mastroianni is back in action as Guido Anselmi, a famous film director who has sunk into creative catatonia as he struggles to complete a movie about the survivors of a thermonuclear war who are building a spaceship to take them away from earth, like fugitives on a modern-day Noah's Ark. Guido is uncertain whether this grandiose project will be the crowning achievement of his career or the final disaster that will expose him as the fraud he suspects he really is, a director with nothing to say.

We gradually come to see that the real director, Fellini, has made a movie about the making of 8 1/2. In this movie within a movie, we are shown how Guido's creative powers are fueled by the tumult of his philandering life, by the many women who cycle through his affections and by the childhood memories that continue to script his erotic fantasies in adulthood. Fellini has assembled a brilliant female cast for this movie, from Claudia Cardinale who plays the role of Guido's stunningly beautiful muse to Eddra Gale as Saraghina, the "devil woman" who gives schoolboy Guido his first taste of the rumba and female sexuality.

It seems to me now as I sift through my lumpy memories from a half century ago that 8 1/2 appealed less to my libidinal awakening than to my political awakening. In the final scene of the movie, a press conference is held at the site of the outdoor set, which consists of three giant towers that will launch Noah's Ark into outer space. The event has been arranged by the movie's producers who are at their wit's end trying to deal with cost overruns and Guido's creative block. They are betting that the press conference will enable the director to recover his self-confidence. Confronted by a howling pack of reporters, Guido responds by crawling under a table where he fantasizes about shooting himself with a pistol. This is a setup for 8 1/2's epiphany: Guido suddenly realizes that his movie is a mess because his life is a mess, and his life is a mess because every life is a mess. The only way forward, he tells himself, is to embrace the mess and draw creative inspiration from it, to love, forgive and start again.

Sounds cornball, I know, and hardly the stuff one normally associates with the radical political awakenings that were erupting everywhere during the Sixties. Fellini himself was highly skeptical of political projects that subordinated individual creativity to some stultifying collectivist aim. In the movie, a leftist critic whom Guido brings in to help with the script dismisses the whole project as an exercise in bourgeois narcistic indulgence, devoid of any political or philosophical relevance. Guido hears out the critic with great patience and humility, and then imagines placing a black bag over his head, dropping a noose around his neck and hanging him from the ceiling of the theater where the director, producers and cast have gathered to watch screen tests.

Fellini's antipathies for collectivist politics notwithstanding, what made the biggest impression on me is the movie's grand finale in which Guido calls upon the troop of actors to join hands in a celebratory dance around the ill-fated towers. For as long as I can remember this image has represented for me the creative power of collective action, of individuals linking arms to achieve some common goal. Maybe this sounds cornball, too, but collective action has been one of my bedrock political principles since the 1960s, and to the extent that 8 1/2 had something to do with making it so, I owe Fellini, Mastroianni and Italian cinema a debt I can never repay.

A few blocks away from Sophia's poster was the famous Galleria Principe di Napoli, where Allyson and I came across another poster in a storefront window, this one of Vladimir Lenin ("Imagining Italy," Photo 39). Was I thinking of 8 1/2 when I took the picture? No, not consciously. But do I believe that at some unconscious level the image of Lenin dissolved into one of Guido shouting to his followers at the end of the film, "Let's hold hands." What we have here is another picture of a picture, which you can find on permanent display in the Galleria Principe located between my ears.

Memories are great tricksters. I can't say with certainty when I first saw Marriage Italian Style and 8 1/2, and nor can I tell you how my memories of these films have been edited so as to align with political views I developed and cemented into place in my later years. For better or worse my memories are like a ragù simmered over many hours on low heat.

Scrolling through the photos in "Imagining Italy," I see myself growing into this project, a little by little. The idea of a website had not yet occurred to me in 2019. I didn't even bring a camera to Italy on my first trip, having burned out on photography several years earlier, which is another story you can read about in "The Atlanta Quartet." But Rome, Naples, Sorrento and Capri rekindled the flame of my old love and got me shooting again. What happened? I think it was the simple fact of being on the street and in the crowd, feeling the energy all around me. The sights, sounds and smells were intoxicating. One day when I could no longer manage the sensory overload, I commandeered Allyson's smartphone and started making the pictures you see here. That smartphone was my cloak of invisibility, allowing me to get closer to the action than ever before, when I was dragging around lots of gear and hulking film cameras.

"Imagining Italy" is my foray into street photography, which is about capturing "decisive moments," to use the language of the greatest of all street photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson. My pictures don't measure up to his, that's for sure. But they were the best I could do with what I had at the time, and, more important, they put me back on the road to documentary photography, which is less about bagging Cartier-Bresson's singular decisive moment than stringing together multiple moments to tell a story. The story, not the moment, is what documentary photographers are after.

What story, then, did I want to tell? That's what I had to figure out.

III. SECOND THOUGHTS

Even so, it's not a good idea to confuse movies with life, Italian or otherwise. If you will allow me to fast-forward, when we returned from our Italian getaway, I began to reconsider my fantasy of Joy Italian Style. True, it had gotten me over a difficult patch when the shelter closed and my parents died, but the more I looked at Joy Italian Style, the more naïve it appeared. Or I appeared. Despite my fondness for Fellini, Mastroianni and Italian cinema, I eventually came to understand that if I wanted to experience Italy in the flesh rather than on the screen, I would have to step out of the conga line, at least long enough to see both the country and myself in relation to the mass tourism which was such a powerful driver of the economy. A second trip to Italy in 2024 gave me an opportunity to examine things with a more critical eye, as I will relate in the reflection "Reimagining Italy," and show in the galleries "Revisiting Rome," "Staging Emilia-Romagna" and "Consuming Milan."

But that story will have to wait. For now I will try to situate the concept of Joy Italian Style in historical context by introducing you to one of its most influential exponents, Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pseudonym Stendhal. I knew next to nothing about him when I went to Italy in 2019. But later, as I dove into Italian travel literature in an effort to understand my own perceptions of the country, Stendhal became a regular companion who even accompanied me to Italy in 2024, when a couple of his books ended up in my overhead luggage.

Stendhal was born in Grenoble in 1783, and died in Paris fifty-eight years later. He is remembered today as a writer who straddled the line between romanticism and realism, and who produced histories of art, travelers' guides, autobiographies, a treatise titled On Love and a novel that Balzac judged to be a masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma.

Stendhal spent a good part of his adult life in Italy. He loved the place because, in his view, it was home to people who were free to live and love with authentic passion. He despised post-Napoleonic France because it seemed to have reneged on the promises of the Revolution and reduced life to a chain of mean-spirited transactions over money, position, power, sex and the like. For Stendhal Italians approached life with a degree of emotional urgency and passionate commitment that was utterly alien to the calculating ways of his bourgeois countrymen.

If ever there was a person alienated from the place, people and culture of his birth, it was Stendhal. His contempt for the careerist father who made his boyhood a misery was matched only by the love he felt for his mother who died when Stendhal was just seven years old. The struggle to break free of the emotional straightjacket of his patriarchal upbringing continued throughout Stendhal's entire life as he strove to advance his literary ambitions and administrative career in Paris, Milan and Civitavecchia, the port near Rome, where he was appointed French consul in 1830.

Why do I bring up Stendhal? Because he was a traveler who loved Italy. And because I see a lot of him in my 67-year-old self, which was my age when Allyson and I disembarked at Rome Fiumicino Airport in 2019. I can empathize with Stendhal's feelings of estrangement from the materialist values of bourgeois society. My guess is that many First World travelers who identify themselves as leftists feel the same way, sharing Stendhal's dream or illusion, if that's what you want to call it, that somewhere in the world there exists a place more in tune with their own political longings. Is this romantic naivety? Probably so. Is it an understandable reaction to a world that seems in the grip of terminal crisis? Most definitely.

Let me pause here to clarify the meaning of two terms which I have used rather loosely, travel and tourism. What's the difference between the two, assuming there is one?

In a recent piece appearing on The "Good Tourism" Blog, this question was posed to a "diverse network of travel & tourism stakeholders," including travel writer Elisa Spampinato, who responded by underlining "the classic distinction between the mass tourist—the escapist who loves spending the entire holiday relaxing and unplugging in their bubble—and the adventurous traveller—the open-minded and curious individual that uses travel as a gateway to new worlds and cultures." While this captures an important aspect of Stendhal's embrace of Italy, it overlooks another point made by respondent, David Jarratt, a lecturer in tourism management. Self-identified travelers, he cautions, are all too often elitists who jealously guard their cultural capital by distancing themselves from the tackiness associated with modern mass tourism.

This binary of traveler and tourist is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Stendhal definitely fits the bill as an adventurous traveler, and he was nothing if not a cultural elitist who was appalled by bourgeois crassness in all its forms. But Stendhal was also a product of Enlightenment, a believer in the ideals of the French Revolution and an enemy of despotic rule and priestcraft, which is to say he was a political animal with left-of-center convictions. Our experts above, Spampinato and Jarratt, say nothing about political identity and how it crosscuts the traveler-tourist binary which they take as the starting point of their analysis. When we add this missing dimension, as I believe we should, it seems fair to say that Stendhal was both an "adventurous traveller" and an "escapist." The real question is what was Stendhal escaping? The answer is the stultifying morality and politics of bourgeois life, which is a far cry from the escapism of the "mass tourist" nursing his piña colada at a Cancún resort.

Traveler, adventurer, escapist from the falseness of bourgeois society—this strikes me as a fair description of Stendhal. I wouldn't object if someone said the same about me.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

My Parents, Oceanside, California

THE ITALIAN QUARTET

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist