Survivors of San Lorenzo

As globalization propels people and commerce across international borders, landmark destinations like the San Lorenzo Market in Florence, Italy, are adapting.

Changes to some important cultural traditions, however, can be controversial. Some enterprising vendors here are taking cooperative ownership of the transition from neighborhood market to globalized marketplace.

It was a frigid afternoon in Florence’s San Lorenzo Market. Tourist-shoppers defied the winter weather on their search for gifts and souvenirs. Despite pros-pects for making more sales that day, Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto, three among hundreds of vendors who earn their livings in the outdoor market, closed their stands early. The three friends typically manned their stands until the sun and the temperature dipped further, but that day they had an errand. Picking their way through the crush of shoppers, they arrived at a stunning church. San Lorenzo is the parish church from which the entire neighborhood—and its outdoor market—takes its name. There they would be part of a gathering that included the church prior, representatives from a health care char-ity, supportive spectators, and one anthropologist. With a splendid gray sandstone cloister as a backdrop, they presented the charity with a generous check. It repre-sented individual donations from thousands of residents and tourists who had visited the church’s nativity scene, or presepe, that Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto had created and maintained throughout the holiday season. San Lorenzo was the ideal setting for their expression of community mindedness; in addition to being an architec-tural landmark, it is the neighborhood’s metaphoric heart. Yet despite the long history and personal relationships that unite many people in this neighborhood, the area faces modern-day challenges. Those predicaments had led these three vendor-advocates to create the non-profit association, “The Survivors of San Lorenzo” (hereafter The Survivors), in 2015. Erecting a Christmas crèche to raise funds for charity is part of their outreach, and among the ways that members enhance the quality of life in their community.

The City and the Neighborhood

Florence is a city whose name invokes extraordinary beau-ty and grace. San Lorenzo Church, which was Florence’s Basilica during the Middle Ages, is among its treasures. The illustrious de’ Medici family, its most distinguished patrons, built their home across the street. The church is not the only wonder in this impressive quarter. There is also Michelangelo’s statue of David, the Fort of Saint John the Baptist, the former Convent of Saint Orsola, where the likely model for Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” once lived, and more. While many visitors come to San Lorenzo for art and architecture, others arrive to shop at its renowned market. Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto have spent their professional lives there. These three marketplace stalwarts specialize in different wares— artisanal wooden trays, Florentine mosaic jewelry, and woolen caps and straw fedoras—each proudly offering merchandise made-in-Italy. Each is known for fairmind-edness and trustworthiness as much as for the quality of his merchandise. It may seem incongruent in such an environment that Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto describe themselves as “survivors.” To understand why, we must consider changes that have taken place in San Lorenzo over the past 30 years.

Fourteenth-century birthplace of the Italian Renais-sance, Florence today is an international metropolis. The historic center, where the San Lorenzo Church is located, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But the historic cen-ter is not a museum; it is a lively district with a story that continues to unfold. In the last few decades, for example, globalization has introduced new people and opportuni-ties. These changes have affected the lives of sanlorenzini—the term that people with ties to the neighborhood use to refer to themselves—in complicated ways. Mass tourism and transnational flows of labor carry far reach-ing consequences. Thirteen million tourists spend time and money in Florence each year. As their numbers have grown, so has the marketplace. Mass tourism set the neighborhood on a path to becoming a stopover or even destination point for immigrants from South and East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America seek-ing employment. Outdoor vending is not the only type of labor in which new immigrants are active. Some work alongside locals in an iconic Central Market building where fruits and vegetables are sold on the ground floor and restaurants and wine bars line the upstairs. Others make a living in nearby shops and eateries, international supermarkets, and foreign fast-food takeaways. So many types of people and goods are on the move in San Lo-renzo that a civic leader once described his neighborhood to me as “a seaport on land.”

While the tides of trade have shifted, buying and sell-ing are not new activities in San Lorenzo. Forebears of men like Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto plied merchan-dise on these streets from horse-drawn wagons. Today’s vendors spend up to 12 hours daily selling handicrafts, leather purses, clothing, and more from rolling wooden display carts called banco. A few families have worked in San Lorenzo for generations, bequeathing carts and licenses to their children. As Silvia, co-owner of a stand that has operated since the 1960s, remarked, “My family and I are proud that our kind of work is part of neighborhood history.” She added with a smile, “After so many generations in this spot, we practically consider this banco to be a member of our family!” Like other long-term vendors, Silvia takes satisfaction in running an independent business, maintaining her professional tradi-tions, and cultivating relations based on trust with clients and with local artisans whose work she sells.

Doing Business Like a Florentine

To say that someone “does business like a Florentine merchant” in Italy suggests admiration for a person who is shrewd and sharp at trade. Yet it is obvious to anyone who visits the San Lorenzo Market today that immigrant vendors now outnumber Italians by a large margin. This demographic transformation has taken place over the past 30 years. Most immigrant business owners adhere scrupulously to commercial regulations, but not every migrant to Florence holds a vending license. San Lorenzo’s extraordinary concentration of tourist-shoppers also attracts dozens of irregular vendors seeking off-the-record employment including the sale of counterfeit merchandise such as purses, sunglasses, CDs, and DVDs. Their presence is more than an inconvenience. Illegal vending puts visitors at risk of being fined for purchasing designer knockoffs. Irregular vendors encroach on public space that licensed business owners pay to occupy. Illegal vending makes the marketplace more crowded, more insecure, and less pleasant. Many sanlorenzini feel sympathy for migrants struggling to support themselves, yet they insist that the presence of illegal vending has contributed to the neighborhood’s decline.

I learned how licensed vendors felt about this situ-ation firsthand during 11 seasons of anthropological fieldwork in Florence. My research strategy included lengthy periods as a participant-observer. Between 2006 and 2016, I worked over a thousand hours as a volun-teer at a Florentine family’s banco on the marketplace’s busiest artery. When I commenced dealing directly with customers, I became aware that visitors from abroad were often unable to differentiate legal vendors from irregulars; some tourists mistakenly believed all outdoor merchants got their start selling goods from cardboard boxes. After becoming a vendor myself, I also realized that some ways in which long-term local merchants interact with the public are very different from those of newcomers. I came to understand that relations be-tween vendors and customers are shaped by local cultural norms that govern microsocial interactions. These ideas regarding how people should behave when they buy and sell became the focus of my research.

The Protocol of Being a Vendor

Florentines consider the way they act in the marketplace to be an expression of their identity. Globalization has challenged local norms, however, because it has ush-ered new behaviors into this social arena. For example, international visitors who have traveled to other countries with open air markets sometimes erroneously believe that merchants everywhere operate the same way. In other markets, vendors may call to potential clients or even take them by the arm to get their attention. Else-where, vendors may offer large discounts as a matter of course, sometimes within seconds of customers’ arrival. Florentines consider these behaviors boorish. Given differing cross-cultural expectations, however, it does not occur to all international shoppers that a Florentine vendor is simply abiding by local norms when he or she does not call out loudly to a passersby or offer the large discounts that are promised swiftly by some others. From a local vendor’s perspective, merchants should respect customers’ privacy by remaining in the background for a minute or two while the customer examines mer-chandise. Asking a Florentine vendor for a tremendous discount suggests the customer does not trust the vendor. In such circumstances, it is unsurprising that sanlorenzini complain that the market now feels “less Floren-tine,” or, as vendors told me “it has become hard to act Florentine here.” International tourist-shoppers, for their part, often leave perplexed, wrongly believing that they have been ignored or that an Italian vendor tried to take advantage of them by not giving them a big discount. It is distressing to read the well-intentioned but mistaken “advice” posted on internet sites by some tourists urging future visitors to “walk away if a vendor does not imme-diately come up and offer you a fifty percent discount.”

Vendor-Advocates in Action

Not every local merchant has successfully weathered the transition from neighborhood market to globalized marketplace. Many families have closed their stands. Dozens of banchi or carts have been removed as part of redevelopment programs and questions are being raised regarding whether the market should be maintained. It is in this sense that Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto regard themselves as “The Survivors of San Lorenzo.” As their association’s logo, they adopted the image of a hand, cradling the San Lorenzo Church and other important landmarks, bursting from darkened rubble. I returned to Florence in 2018 to learn about their progress. I found that the association has become an important voice for preservation of their neighborhood’s legacy.

When Alessandro, Paolo, and Roberto established The Survivors they had specific goals in mind: promote legality and transparency including a requirement that merchants reveal whether goods they offer are imported or made-in-Italy; support efforts to end illegal vending; and encourage cleanliness and decorum. Alessandro explained, “We have always had rules in this market, although some are being ignored. We want everyone to follow the rules so that everyone is at ease and the market also survives. We are defending what this market repre-sents to us.”

For their first project, The Survivors rescued an artis-tic work with special meaning to residents and vendors alike: the Tabernacolo delle Fonticine, or Tabernacle of the Little Fountains. The Tabernacle is a 16th-century masterpiece located on a wall across the street from the marketplace. Created in 1522 by Girolemo della Robbia, it features an extraordinary polychrome terracotta of the Madonna and Child surrounded by saints. Beneath the terracotta figures is a large marble basin into which cool water flows from the mouths of seven marble cherubs. The tabernacle is notable not only as an example of reli-gious art: it is a link to the history of Florence’s working classes. During the Medieval and Renaissance periods, tradesmen and laborers prohibited from assuming roles in city politics created neighborhood organizations known as “Festive Kingdoms.” The “Kingdoms” were in essence mutual aid associations. Biliemme Kingdom, which means “Song and Dance,” was particularly active in San Lorenzo. It commissioned the tabernacle for the benefit of the neighborhood. Lately, however, the tabernacle had languished. Without protection from the elements and automobile exhaust, the terracotta figures had become covered by a filthy yellow pall. The cherubs’ faces were cracked and some of their noses had fallen off. The marble basin was used as a public washroom or dog wash. Roberto, President of The Survivors, explained, “We took the tabernacle as our first project because look-ing at it broke our hearts. A piece of heritage utterly aban-doned that we looked at every day. We found allies and an art institute agreed to perform the restoration. Now it is once again being admired, people drink from the fountain, school groups are visiting it. That success made us realize that we really could help our neighborhood.”

The Survivors’ second project drew upon its mem-bers’ own artistic talents. Many of Florence’s churches host nativity scenes during the Christmas season. San Lorenzo Church, however, lacked a crèche. The Survi-vors built a unique one befitting its location. In what is often called the “Crèche of the Florentines,” miniatures of iconic city landmarks including the cathedral, the Old Bridge, and the San Lorenzo Church are arranged behind the Holy Family on cotton-ball hills that recall the actual hills surrounding Florence. In the “sky” above, suspended as if they were stars, are tiny portraits of historical figures whom, as Alessandro put it “made Florence grand.” He noted, “Some of these Florentines are not as famous as others. But you do not need to be famous to make the city a better place.” Visitors leave donations which, as with the check for the healthcare organization, are distributed to charity. Other associa-tion initiatives include an annual dinner to recognize local heroes. Among the 2018 honorees were a firefighter who dived into the freezing Arno River to save a life, and a female taxi driver who dresses like a fairy to amuse the children whom she transports free of charge to their chemotherapy appointments.

I asked Paolo why The Survivors volunteered so much time and resources to neighborhood rehabilitation. He replied: “We want everyone—Florentines and visitors alike—to understand that the situation in San Lorenzo today does not represent the San Lorenzo that we used to know, where we grew up. San Lorenzo is not a place of chaos or where people behave disrespectfully. It is a com-munity. We want to make people aware of the beautiful art and honest people at its heart.”

The Survivors of San Lorenzo continues to grow; some shop owners have also joined the nonprofit group. Its activities are attracting positive attention for the entire neighborhood. In sum, these vendor-advocates are “working” to preserve their heritage in an increasingly internationalized city. Their accomplishments under-score the fact that visitors, just like anthropologists, may discover expressions of Florentine heritage in unexpected places, even in an open-air market, as worthy of preserva-tion as any other of this city’s splendid assets.

ANNE SCHILLER, PH.D., is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. Her research concerns Italian urban geographies and social networks. She is grateful
to The Survivors of San Lorenzo, in particular Alessandro Belli-Blanes, Paolo La Regina, Roberto Calamai, and Silvia Radicchi, for participation in the study on which this article is based.