Strange City: The Umarells of Bologna

Umarells by Wittylama is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

By Dan Carney:

One of the more eye-catching new words in last year’s edition of the popular Zingarelli Italian language dictionary was umarell. The definition accompanying this rather unItalian-sounding term read: “Pensioner who wanders, mostly with their hands behind their backs, at work sites, checking, asking questions, giving suggestions or criticizing the activities that take place there.” Although this might seem too specific to suggest particularly common usage, those from the Emilia-Romagna capital Bologna, where these elderly self-appointed foremen are a common sight, could be forgiven for wondering why formal recognition had taken so long. 

The term, which derives from the regional dialect words for “little man” - omarello or ometto - was first coined back in 2005 by Bolognese blogger Danilo Massotti, when he started cataloguing online the many umarells he came across throughout the city. The concept resonated. Before long, people were sending Masotti pictures of umarells they had spotted. Bolognese construction workers, on completion of works, began putting notices up at the sites giving the location of the next project. Smartphone apps giving these details also started to appear. 

The fame and popularity of the umarells has continued to rise, with the concept now well known throughout Italy, and their commercial and cultural presence has increased accordingly. The highest profile tie-in came in 2016, when Burger King recruited five for a video campaign to promote their new Italian branches. Franco (78), Clemente (69), Salvator (70), Ugo (73), and Adriano (81) became site foremen for a day, with surveyors to log their recommendations. The advert went viral. The Milanese company TheFabLab have also issued an umarell desktop action figure, cast in the familiar hands-behind-back pose, designed to watch over you as you work. Last year, a board game, La Giornata dell’Umarell (“the daily routine of the umarell”), was launched. Massotti, the originator, has published a number of umarell-themed books.

Umarells have also found themselves honoured in popular culture. In May 2020 the prominent Milanese singer Fabio Concato released ‘L’Umarell’, a song in which he describes an encounter with one during the COVID pandemic. Neopolitan film director Adam Selo is currently developing ‘Umarells’, a full-length to be shot on location in the city, in which the umarells rescue the city’s construction projects after workers go on strike.  

The most concrete commemoration came in 2018, when a square on the outskirts of Bologna was renamed in their honour. Speaking at the inauguration of La piazzetta degli umarells, city councilor Matteo Lepore told Italian daily la Repubblica: “It is a way of saying thank you to the many people who every day commit themselves free of charge for the common good.” Elsewhere, in Pescara, a real-estate company has installed umarell-friendly viewing windows in the fences around their sites.

Emilia-Romagna’s most famous umarell is Franco Bonini, who in 2015 was the recipient of a specially created ‘Umarell of the year’ award for his dedicated observation of a shipyard construction site in the comune of San Lazzaro di Savenna, a few miles from central Bologna. He is still recognized due to the TV and newspaper appearances arising from his victory. The title also came with the prize of a day as honorary site director, conferred by the town’s deputy mayor and the site’s project manager. 

Bonini’s temporary promotion isn’t the only example of umarells being given direct involvement in the construction process. In 2015, the coastal municipality of Riccione budgeted €11k to pay retirees to observe sites, monitoring delivery of materials to prevent theft. This year, Uniamo Riccione, a centre-left political association in the town, have launched an Operation Umarell recruitment drive in conjunction with mayor Daniela Angelini. The advert, a stirring call to arms for community-minded retirees, read:

“Are you over 60/65 years old? Do you love your city, your neighbourhood, your avenue, your house, your building? Do you want a better future for your children, grandchildren, family, for yourself and for your community? Do you want to become an “attentive observer” of everything that happens and help solve it? There is a sidewalk to be fixed, an architectural barrier to be removed, a family to help, a tree to protect, children to accompany to school, shopping for those who cannot move. If all this and much more is part of your wishes, you are the GRANDFATHER or GRANDMA for us!”

Those who signed up were given a direct line to both Angelini’s team and the town’s police in order to report issues, as well as a badge to signify their status as one with whom concerns could be raised. The scheme is ongoing.  

A cynical interpretation of the umarells’ rise may be that it simply represents a marketing opportunity, a chance to drum up cash or attention, or – in the case of the Riccione initiatives - a neat way of getting around municipal funding gaps. But the fact that they continue to resonate, over fifteen years after their identification, might also stem from Italians’ inclusive and respectful attitudes towards older people. Italian life expectancy – and the proportion of the population over 65 - is among the highest in the world, with the elderly more visible, and integral to the family unit, than in most other developed countries. The celebration and inclusion of Umarells may, in part at least, be a result of this. 

Nevertheless, some of the connotations are undoubtedly negative. Massotti’s initial characterisation - old men with nothing to do who get kicked out of the house early by their wives - feels slightly derisory, although he has always emphasized the term is meant to be ironic and affectionate, rather than pejorative. The word has also become an everyday Italian expression for those who stand on the sidelines offering advice but never getting involved, a kind of Mediterranean analogue to Harry Enfield’s meddlesome and judgmental “you don’t want to do it like that” character. In 2021 Lepore, so approving when helping to inaugurate the umarell square but now running his (ultimately successful) Bologna mayoral campaign, stated in an interview that his political approach was proactive, rather than that of the umarell. Everyone knew what he meant.  

Overall, however, the umarell phenomenon has brought about more good than harm. As well as enabling the celebration and inclusion of the elderly, their ongoing popularity may also signify that they offer a still-living folk memory, a familiar Italian archetype that provides something reassuring: seniority, experience, and a prioritization of communal benefit over corner cutting and profit. This may be particularly pertinent given current economic and cultural uncertainties, with many feeling unable to trust that those in charge of infrastructure have their best interests at heart. 

This may, of course, be over-analyzing what is simply a funny observation of a universally recognizable subgroup of the Italian populace. But whatever the deeper reasons for the ongoing popularity of umarells, it is clear that they have something to offer beyond unsolicited sideline advice and a neat line in anoraks. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychological research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Memories of Elsewhere: Tre Cime di Lavaredo, by Steve Himmer

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Steve Himmer:

There are better hikes. Hikes where you don't wait in a long line of cars and coaches to pay admission. Hikes that don't begin at a trailhead with three terraced levels of parking and tour buses spilling groggy riders by the hundreds. I've spilled from those buses myself in each of the past three years, bringing successive groups of college students to Italy's Dolomites as part of a course.

The trail, reached after a long walk on pavement, remains crowded as it departs the Refugio Auronzo, your last chance for snacks and souvenirs until the next thirty minutes away. It's entirely flat though there are numerous spots at which enthusiasts might veer off to inspect pale rock formations above or green meadows below. There's as much shuffling between oncoming walkers and getting ahead of slow moving clusters as on any Venetian sidewalk (which my students encounter soon after), with the same risk of selfie sticks swung at eye height. Last summer a drone buzzed overhead the whole route and I found myself uncharitably wishing for the invisible pilot to twist an ankle or crash the contraption or both.

There is no reason, in other words, no reason at all, for any person who enjoys hiking or mountains or being able to hear their own thoughts to visit Tre Cime di Lavaredo in summer. I bring my students up other trails in the region, like the exposed, narrow spine designed to cause vertigo at Cinque Torri. But of all the more meditative, more challenging, wilder places I've walked it's Tre Cime I'm thinking of lately, with its trio of spires in pale lunar stone.

That flat, gravel trail hangs on the rim of a valley, offering sustained views toward a far away lake so blue it can't be described without risking cliché. Overhead, set into the faces of the three peaks themselves, are the shadowed mouths of caves left by soldiers who endured the fierce fighting and vertical living of World War I along that contested border between Austria and Italy. The meadows call out for singing — my students reliably belt selections from The Sound of Music — then stretching out among flowers to bathe in high altitude sun and forget, for a while, that the trail a few meters above remains packed with people watching their phones as much as their feet or their world. The longest downward digression reaches a memorial statue to honor the marksmen of the 8th Bersaglieri regiment: a tall angel standing wings folded with one hand pressed to the pommel of his sword and the other holding a wreath as he keeps watch over the towns of the valley below.

After all that, beyond the memorial or at least where its steep path departs from the trail if you choose not to take it, past the rugged Cappella degli Alpini with its steeple low enough to stay out of the wind, you'll arrive at the trail's second chance for food and trinkets, Refugio Lavaredo. The outdoor patio will be crowded and you'll jockey for space at a table — a large group will most likely be scattered — but the polenta and sauerkraut and venison and boar, not to mention the beer, will achieve depths of flavor and satisfaction they never would at sea level with better prices but without the view. All those other day hikers, marvelling in languages from all over the world, are there for the same reasons you are and so what if it's at the same time.

The trail carries on past that second refuge. All told it's a six mile loop that climbs more aggressively after Refugio Lavaredo to reach a plateau with views across the Austrian border. It swings around the far side of the peaks to reclaim the parking lot from the opposite end. But most of those having lunch won't go up, or if they do it will be a short scramble to take in the view and to see what remains of some World War I bunkers before coming back down to return to their coaches the way they arrived.

The way we arrived, I should say, because with my students it's always like that, not enough time to complete the full loop.

What I miss, what I long for right now, are the things that annoy me on that trail: the people, the jostling, the cacophony of human voices and dogs greeting each other, the elbows-in space of the refugio's terrace, and more than anything else the fresh awe of my students each summer through whose eyes that crowded, unwelcoming, less than wild trail and valley and ancient rock face could never grow old. I've watched one of them spring hircine up a steep slope only a day after facing down her fierce fear of heights on another peak. I've seen a sprained ankle risk ruining the day for the group but result instead in a ride back to the coach clinging to the waist of a refugio host straight off the bodice-ripped cover of a romance novel. I've had the privilege and pleasure of introducing that mob scene to new students each year, along with annual guilty grappling with my own conflicted emotions about our contribution to its overcrowding, and I've read what they've written about it.

This year's course is in jeopardy while that region of Italy suffers as badly as any place does, but I daydream of summers and students to come when the world has found its new normal. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo have seen centuries of avalanches and harsh winters and soldiers lost where they can't be recovered, and every hike there, however constrained, is undertaken in the shadow of those many deaths. So the more legs out on the trail walking, the more voices raised and the more elbows bumped while hoisting a beer, the greater the celebration of being there against odds.

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Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram and Scratch, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in the US and the Netherlands.

Memories of Elsewhere: The King of Rome, by David Lewis

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By David Lewis:

The corona virus has made it impossible to travel, but in memory we can revisit places we have not seen for many years. This morning cypress trees against a blue sky reminded me of Rome, before Easter 1995.

We had a strange, confusing night high above the harsh floodlights of Santa Maria Maggiore and were delayed, directed, and redirected, until eventually we washed up at Salvatore's crumbling palazzo on Via del Clementino. A soft midday light fell down the stairwell onto the palazzo’s blood-brown walls, protected by a small Madonna and Child with a flickering electric candle. Salvatore welcomed us with a roar. 'You have the Queen in England,' he bellowed, 'but I am the King of Rome!' The palazzo was being restored. Thick plastic sheeting instead of walls, staircases without hand-rails, rubble. Our rooms had a lopped square of blue sky, three storeys of families, a courtyard of scooters and a solitary battered Fiat. Every morning I ate alone in a tall grey room, the windows open to the clatters of the street below. Billowing muslin curtains, iced croissants and coffee, but I remember no other guests.  

We had no money. Warm days carved the city into slabs of chocolate-black shade and fierce sunlight and we walked everywhere, saw broken arches, crowds, Lambrettas, tombs. The light fell from a strip of blue above the ochre streets, from the oculus of the Pantheon or from a high unseen window, showering dusty light onto angel and cherub - the huge Roman churches were cool and gloomy, as if we walked a cold marble pavement on the floor of the sea.  

Lunch was usually small tubs of olives, fish, tomatoes and rice from Piazza Nicosia near the palazzo, picnics on the dry grass of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Palatine Hill, the old street market in pre-hipster Trastevere; but I also remember lunches in the flower market of Campo de' Fiori, a table for two in the cool gloom, the long tables outside taken by the flower sellers' families.  

And the great ruins - we crept around the giant silences of the Colosseum, the shaggy remnants of the Forum, isolated fragments of towering wall. We saw gold and silver foil eggs in shop windows; sunlight on book spines and vine trellis in the Keats-Shelley House; gleams from golden icons in the Vatican, after emerging blinking from the cold graves of the Catacombs.  

Salvatore's Madonna welcomed us home as the scooter kids roared in from college. An irregular flag of sunlight played on the wall opposite, a cracked fresco of brown-red and cream plaster. As the light darkened, we finished the crumpled tubs of lunch, drank flasks of Orvieto, read Byron’s journals. Sometimes we walked the streets as the soft darkness and jagged splinters of light divided the city, as a door was opened and closed like a lantern veiled and unveiled, a Caravaggio moment when hooded spies were revealed as students turning to laugh at a shout from a passing Vespa. I remember moments – footsteps echoing on snakeskin cobbles, floodlit churches, a night in the bars around Piazza Navona.  On our last night, a Chinese meal near the Oratory of St Philip Neri, where the Saint broke out of the solemn procession of consecration to play football with local boys.  

Memory is as slippery as fishes. How many days were we there? Were we really the only guests in the palazzo? It does not matter. In memory we can revisit lost places, and strengthen our recollections of time and place. In times of quarantine, I find this a comfort.  

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David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

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Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.