It’s not a place for old men

What you are about to read is the first piece from the new issue of Rivista Studio, Don’t Call It a Province. If you want to buy a copy, go here, to our online store.

Until a few weeks ago, the only thing I could have said about Nuchis (in the northeast of Sardinia), Lusigliè (near Turin), and Spilimbergo (in Friuli-Venezia Giulia) is that they all have objectively beautiful names. Thanks to that magical gift called the web, however, today I can tell you this: the main bar in Lusigliè is called La censa and is run by Margherita, who emphasizes that she is “happy with life” and, for the rest, speaks in a strong Piedmontese dialect. Nuchis doesn’t have sushi, nor a cinema or a supermarket: Roberta, who lives there, says that “there’s practically nothing,” except for sheep and horses in the surrounding fields. At the entrance of Spilimbergo, there is a gigantic sign announcing the name of the town: it is covered in small tiles because one of the best mosaic schools in the world is located here.
What unites them is the fact that they are all, undoubtedly, small towns: this was decided by Bry, a content creator from Veneto who in recent months has gained over 100,000 followers on Instagram with a format titled “How Small Town Is Your Small Town?”. In his videos, Bry visits tiny municipalities accompanied by local youths, and assigns each small town a score based on a series of criteria: the number of inhabitants, the quality of the town’s bar, the cooperativeness of the grandparents, the degree of gentrification. 

How Small Town Is Your Small Town?

Bry grew up in a small town near Treviso, and today he is one of the most recognizable faces of a new wave of Italian memers and creators who have made the province their main source of inspiration. Their content is far from the glossy and somewhat fake nostalgia of articles that romanticize “slow life,” but also from the disdain of those who can’t wait to leave: it is rather a clear affection, ironic but not biting, deeply aware of the qualities and limits of these places.
Monica Magnani belongs to this same family, known on Instagram as @vaberagaa and has been producing diary-like memes often inspired by the Lombard countryside where she grew up for years. In her beloved memes, references to ditches, nutria, fog, and the “fart trains” that take you to the city and risk stopping at any moment and never starting again often appear. “This place raised me,” says Magnani. “I’m not talking about the people – I’m talking about the environment. That view, being out and among the fields, smelling that scent of the earth, which is much better than a calendar: it marks time better, it tells you more accurately when a season is changing.”
Monica does not romanticize the province in the traditional sense – she does not turn it into a backdrop, nor does she strip it of its uncomfortable elements – but uses it as a visual mother tongue, the code through which everything else becomes expressible.

In her experience, these are memes that resonate even with users from the other side of Italy. “There are two levels,” she says. “There’s an imagery shared by all Italians – the tobacco shop sign, delayed trains, Goleador – and then there’s a deeper layer that belongs only to those from a specific area. Maybe it’s a meme that makes both a person from Rome and one from Lombardy laugh, but someone from my area understands it differently. There’s an extra layer,” she explains. It’s the same thing that happens with dialect, she says: you can understand it, but feeling it is another thing.

What Monica, Bry, and a constellation of similar pages and accounts are doing is not, however, a completely new phenomenon. Marzio Persiani, who has been managing Relatable Roma Memes for years, one of the longest-standing and most appreciated hyperlocal meme pages in Italy, reminds us of this. Persiani is a kind of historical memory of this scene, which counts dozens and dozens of large and small meme pages scattered throughout the country: he recalls an early wave of “provincial shitposting” on Facebook, between 2016 and 2019. During that time, he says, publishing memes of this type allowed communities of young people remaining in the province “to reflect on themselves in a lateral, ironic way; not politically or identitarily in the classical sense, but through customs, clichés, and shared small rituals.”

Provincial Shitposting

In those years, pages emerged that exalted the power of Rome as if the empire were still standing – like Marzio’s own Relatable Roma Memes – and esoteric pages about tiny fractions, full of hyper-specific references incomprehensible to any random user, like Living in Lecco Ironically or Pioltello Shitposting. Journalist Viola Giacalone, analyzing the phenomenon a few years later, would speak of “a strange reproduction of a pre-unified Italy, divided by dialects, competitions, customs, and mythologies,” reflecting a need to reaffirm local identity and the search for roots in a globalized world, driven mainly by the very young. According to Persiani, however, talking about folkloric memes is reductive. “When I think of folklore, I think of something that changes completely from bell tower to bell tower,” he says. “Here, instead, the content was local but the language was shared. The lore of the place changed, but the memetic grammar was the same.” In other words: they were people coming from geographically different places but sharing a common language, borrowed from the same online communities and the memetic frameworks of the moment. The patron saint of the town or the type of inside joke about the inhabitants of a certain area could change, but inside you would still find the same visual structures bouncing from 4chan to Reddit to Facebook, around the world.The phenomenon, after all, was not only Italian: in France, during the same period, the group of Parisian memes Memes intra-muros pour jeunes Franciliens openly clashed with the provincial group Memes décentralisés pour provinciaux et francophones oubliés, shaping online a center vs periphery competition that has existed for centuries.

Then the younger ones moved to Instagram, and provincial shitposting went with them, with consequences that Marzio describes as a partial crippling. “Facebook favored text a lot, depth, interaction in the comments,” he explains. “Often these pages had an associated group where the real collective comedic engine took place: long discussions, contributions from dozens of people, a choral dimension that reflected the community being talked about.” Instagram, on the other hand, rewards individual creators and makes the collective practice of meme creation much more difficult.

What remains, evidently, is a strong fascination for the province. According to Persiani, it’s no coincidence: “The general public’s attention has somewhat shifted away from cities that are becoming the same great Western city, indistinguishable from others,” he says. “While those from the province, at this point, especially if it’s a remote, small, and seemingly unfortunate province, can bring something new, something less seen.” A part of the success of @vaberagaa, he explains, comes from here: “It brings this almost magical dimension of the Cremonese countryside that becomes almost the middle earth, a fairy forest.”

The Province as Aesthetic

In the same category, however, is the memer @piastrellesexy, who works on the complementary imagery of a bare, industrial province, made of vast supermarket parking lots, plastic chairs, 1970s bathrooms, an aesthetic of peri-urban nothingness that does not seek redemption. “They seem a bit like the children of Luigi Ghirri and Gianni Celati,” says Persiani.  The reference is to the Emilian photographer and the Lombard writer who, starting in the 1960s, narrated the Po Valley through a disorienting and almost metaphysical imagery. Both have long remained on the margins of the Italian cultural canon, considered too minor or too peripheral. “Not by chance,” observes Persiani, “they are authors who, with this glamorization of the province, have become very fashionable among Millennials and Gen Z. They bring this bare, industrial province, made only of cigarettes smoked in the parking lot – all stuff you don’t have in the city.”

In this context, he adds, “the province can become a costume. An aesthetic that is put on and taken off.” It’s the same difference that exists between the villages in lifestyle magazines and Bry’s videos about small towns. He, having moved to the city to study and then work, knows well that “if I had stayed there, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I have now.” “Leaving the small town made me rediscover the small town,” he adds. “When you live there, you take certain things for granted. Then you leave and think: why is no one talking about it?”.
In his experience, “How Small Town Is Your Small Town?” works very well precisely because it brings an interested and non-judgmental gaze towards spaces that many recognize as if they were their own pockets, even if they have never been there. “The small town always has the same elements,” says Bry. “The bar, the square, the grandparents, the church. Even if a small town in the north is different from one in the south, there are things that make them the same.” It’s not necessary to know where Lusigliè is or to recognize a street in Nuchis. It’s enough to have had, somewhere, your own small town.