La dismissione tra storia economica e racconto: il caso di Bagnoli

The industrial trend of Bagnoli and specifically the history of ILVA-ITALSIDER has been analyzed by a multiplicity of viewpoints and historiographical approaches. Bagnoli may be the reflection of the dynamics that characterized first the process of convergence of the country towards the center of the world system, through the economic miracle of the fifties and sixties, and then, the phase of involution started in the mid-seventies and culminated in the Italian crisis of the last two decades. But Bagnoli was not only an essential piece of the great Italian and southern enterprise of the twentieth century, but also the designated center of the transformation of the urban, economic and social fabric of Naples and Campania. The aim of this contribution is to explore the different ways in which the story of Bagnoli has been lived in the cultural, social and economic fabric of the city, in the inevitable interweaving of these categories, and to examine with wich narrative and informative tools it was described, both in the phases of expansion of plants and in those of crisis and deindustrialization. To this end, the main features of the long process of industrialization of the area have been reconstructed, from the birth of the ILVA, to the expansion of the factory and the subsequent development of the ITALSIDER, up to the most recent attempts of development of abandoned areas, hitherto unsuccessful. The central part of the work, however, consists of a broad illustration of how this story of an industry has become part of a vast collection of expressive tools, imaginary and culture, through different languages and communicative forms: from literature to photography, from fiction cinema to documentaries, from music to popular tradition, up to the new tools typical of the digital revolution in progress. In this way, it emerges the complexity of an always alive and culturally lively relationship between the city and its company. The literature, the cinematography, the other creative forms that recounted the Phlegraean industry and its disposal do not offer a comforting description, but give back the deep sense of the connection between the production, the work, the individual and the social relations that derive from it, in a town always in balance between its vitality, its potential and its points of fall, between the paradise of its places.