This document summarizes a chapter about analyzing the daily rhythms of life in Venice through a "rhythmanalytic" lens. It discusses how tourism has come to dominate Venice's economy and shape its daily life. The author analyzes a YouTube series called "Rugagiuffa" that depicts the difficulties young Venetians face living in a city catering almost exclusively to tourists. The author argues that tourism has reduced Venice to a "mirage" or "picture postcard" spectacle, trivializing daily life for residents and allowing the tourist economy to take control of the city.

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Overtourism as a worrying tide: A rhythmanalytic experiment on Venetian
everyday life
Guido Borelli
Abstract
This chapter is an account of a rhythmanalysis of a representation of daily life in Venice in
calle Rugagiuffa in a YouTube series. This series – named Rugagiuffa in reference to the
calle in which was filmed – was self-produced by a group of young friends struggling with
an everyday reality very different from the one presented by tour operators: a lack of rental
property, unemployment, or work that is demeaning and strictly off-the-books. In the first
part of the chapter, I refer to the basic concepts of the rhythmanalytic methodology
developed by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier and use it to describe Venetian
rhythms starting from the relations between the body and urban space. Then, I adapt
Lefebvre's thought in order to show how the status of ‘city of art’ coincides, for Venice, on
the one hand with its commodification for exclusively tourist purposes, and on the other hand
with the trivialization of Venetian daily life, reduced to a tourist spectacle. In the final part I
use Rugagiuffa as a bittersweet mise-en-scène of the ability of the tourist monoculture to
take possession at various levels of daily life and its relationship with the residents. I argue
that the daily life of the Venetian citizens is subsumed within the city’s tourist-commercial
spectacle to the point of imposing, in spite of themselves, a high degree of consensus,
adherence, commitment and integration.
Venezia now and then: a necessary premise
It is difficult to begin this chapter without mentioning that between the time I proposed my
contribution to this edited volume and the time that it was ready to be published, many things
happened in Venice.
It started with the exceptional aqua granda on the night of 12 November 2019. At a 187-
centimetre peak, the height of the water was just six centimetres below the historic and
catastrophic flood of 4 November 1966. I witnessed those days directly. Amongst all the
images that appear in my mind’s eye, there are three that, in my opinion, effectively

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represent not only the meaning of those events, but above all the exceptional everyday life
and rhythms of the lagoon city.
The first image represents the reaction of the Venetians to the devastating impact of the
waters. The damage was considerable both for cultural heritage and for commercial and
residential buildings. The residents, together with the National Civil Protection Service and
volunteers, worked tirelessly to remedy the disruption that affected almost the entire city.
This image was characterized by the compound sense of self-sacrifice of the residents and
the total absence of any form of complaint, as well as by the frustrating recurrence with
which it habitually reappears.
The second image depicts the other tide that afflicts Venice: the touristic one. Regardless
of what was happening in the city, the intromettitori stationed at the Tronchetto car park
steer newly arrived tourists away from public transport to their lancioni (longboats) bound
for St. Mark’s Square. The tourists, referred to locally as ‘the idiots of the selfie’, experienced
the exceptional flood as a happy and unexpected experiential surplus that they had certainly
not imagined when they booked their holiday in Venice. Their joyful presence, together with
their improvised water games, contrasted with the breathlessness and composed
desperation of those who were trying to bring works of art, goods and everyday objects to
safety.
The third image is that of a small bacaro (a Venetian tavern serving wine by the glass
and snacks) at Tolentini, near the headquarters of my University. Although the kiosk was
flooded, it was also crowded with clients (for the most part residents) who, equipped with
appropriate boots, continued undeterred to chat and consume cicchetti (an appetizer) and
ombre (literally a shadow; in fact, a glass of wine). What was amazing about this image was
the natural rhythm with which this Venetian ritual was repeated, perfectly at ease. As if not
even an exceptional event was capable of modifying the cyclicality of ordinary life in the
lagoon city.
What Venice demonstrated on that day in November was dramatic and spectacular. What
I saw with my own eyes was a heterogeneous multitude of people who, at a particular
moment in time, animated Venice – each with its place, rhythm, imagination, near past and
distant future.
And then, a few months later, the restrictive measures imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic
wiped out the incessant Venetian tourist tide in an instant. The city suddenly found itself
returned to its few inhabitants, the water in the canals was clear again and silence reigned
in the calli and campi (streets and squares). Only a few months earlier, on 3 August 2019,

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the magazine, The Week, dedicated its cover to Venice with the title, ‘Unwelcome guests.
The curse of tourist overcrowding’ and symbolically elected Venice as the world capital of
overtourism. During lockdown (as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic), tourism was the sector
that suffered most. For Venice, this presents an unexpected problem of undertourism and
the discovery of being unable to live without the tourism that is also slowly killing it.
These elements, in their relative unpredictability and exceptionality, reiterate that
everything we generally recognize as the uniqueness, excess or extravagance of the lagoon
city is, in reality, the result of a process of social creativity that in Venice has (historically and
geographically) an acute resonance. Researching Venice means accepting the
representations that transfigure, alter and deform its constituent properties but give it
meaning through (only) apparently trivial, insignificant or misleading habits. The
rhythmanalytic approach – because of its propensity to deal with the relationship between
the body, its rhythms and the surrounding space – is used here as a rich approach to
understand and critique daily life in Venice.
This chapter is organised as follows. In the next section I discuss the basic concepts of
the rhythmanalytic methodology developed by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier to
describe Venetian rhythms, starting from the relations between the body and the urban
space. I introduce the distinction made by the French philosopher and urban scholar
between the social body and the carnal body, and I take this distinction as a device that
allows us to question the temporal and spatial structure produced by work and by the
specialization of places. In the sections that follow, I adapt Lefebvre's thought (together with
that of Jean-Paul Sartre) in order to show how the status of the ‘city of art’ coincides, for
Venice, on the one hand with its commodification for exclusively tourist purposes, and on
the other hand with the trivialization of Venetian daily life, reduced to a tourist spectacle (in
Lefebvre's terms a ‘mirage’, or in more colloquial terms, a ‘picture postcard’). I then highlight
these conditions through the application of the rhythmanalytic method to Rugagiuffa, a web
series streamed on YouTube about a group of young Venetians grappling with the difficulties
of living in a city that conditions their daily lives. In the conclusion, I draw attention to some
general implications introduced by the rhythmanalytical method in research practices which
seek to study the rhythms of daily life.
The bodies that produce Venetian space
In Lefebvre’s prolific literary production, Venice occupies an apparently marginal place:
some references can be found to it in The Production of Space (1992 [1974]),

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Rhythmanalysis (2004 [1992]) and Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (2014 [1973]).
However, the few pages he dedicated to the lagoon city are extraordinary for the sharpness
and synthesis with which they were written and are fundamental both to illustrate and clarify
some effects of tourist flows in Venice.
For Lefebvre any reflection on space cannot be limited either to an intellectual
representation or to a sum of objects placed in it, and this is particularly true for Venice,
where place is qualified above all by the bodies that determine it. In The Production of Space
(1992, p. 160), he argues that: ‘semantic and semiological categories such as a message,
code and reading/writing could be applied only to spaces already produced, and hence could
not help us understand the actual production of space’. Venice is then the ideal example to
get out of this impasse and the analysis of the five textual codes, proposed by his friend
Roland Barthes (1975) is an appropriate way to deal with it. This is how Lefebvre (1992, p.
161), using Barthes’ semiotics, imagines Ego’s attempts to read Venice:
…first and foremost, the code of knowledge: on arrival in St Mark’s Square Ego
knows a certain number of things about Venice – about les doges, the Campanile,
and so on. Memory floods his [sic] mind with a multitude of facts. Before long, he
elicits another kind of meaning as he begins reading this (materialized) text in a
manner roughly corresponding to the use of concept of function, to the use of
functional analysis. He will also inevitably latch onto a few symbols: the lion, the
phallus (the Campanile), the challenge to the sea. Though he may have learnt to
attach dates to these, he also perceives them as embodying ‘values’ that are still
relevant – indeed eternal. The disentanglement of these impressions from
knowledge allows another code of reading – the symbolic one – to come into play.
Meanwhile, ‘Ego’ is bound to feel some emotion: he may have been here before,
long ago, or always dreamt of coming; he may have read a book or seen a film –
Death in Venice perhaps. Such feelings are the basis of a subjective and personal
code which now emerges, giving the decoding activity the musical qualities of a
fugue: the theme (i.e. this place – the Square, the Palace, and so on) mobilizes
several voices in a counterpoint in which these are never either distinct or confused.
Finally, the simple empirical evidence of the paving-stones, the marble, the café
tables lead ‘Ego’ to ask himself quite unexpected questions – questions about truth
versus illusion, about beauty versus the message, or about the meaning of a
spectacle which cannot be ‘pure’ precisely because it arouses emotions.

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For Lefebvre (1992, p. 162), this is not a sufficient reading. He wonders: ‘Why five [codes]
rather than four or six, or some another number? By what a mechanism is the choice made
between one and another of these codes?’. The French philosopher identifies at least two
residues in this reading: ‘on the near side, what is overlooked is the body […] on the far side
of the readable/visible, and equally absent from Barthes’s perspective, is power’ (ibid.).
Lefebvre argues that:
When ‘Ego’ arrives in an unknown country or city, he [sic] first experiences it through
every part of his body – through his senses of smell and taste, as (provided he does
not limit this by remaining in his car) through his legs and feet. His hearing picks up
the noises and the quality of the voices; his eyes are assailed by new impressions.
For it is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived – and produced (ibid.).
To this end, Lefebvre (1992, pp. 391-392) affirms the duality of the body as
spatial/carnal body and as a social body referring to Nietzsche and Marx. While from
Marx, Lefebvre borrows the concept of space as a product of the repetition of gestures,
movements or habits in a mode of production, from Nietzsche he retrieves the idea of
the eternal struggle between Logos (λόγος) and Anti-Logos (ἀντί-λόγος). On the side of
Logos, there is the rationality that constantly organizes and refines its attempt to reduce
everything to a pre-established order, bringing together all available forces (enterprises,
state, institutions, family) to dominate the space. In contrast, Anti-Logos mobilizes all
the forces fighting for the appropriation of space: different forms of self-management,
communities, elites trying to change their lives and break established power by all
means. Lefebvre assimilates the spatial/carnal body to a total body that, while listening
and acting in space, rejects all capitalist abstractions that try to exclude it from the full
enjoyment of space. The total body has an immediate relationship with space, as in a
sort of primordial complicity. It acts as a differential field that, with its senses, breaks the
temporal and spatial armature produced by the work and specialization of places. The
space it produces represents: ‘the enigma of the body – its secret, at once banal and
profound is its ability […] to produce differences “unconsciously” out of repetitions – out
of gestures (linear) or out of rhythms (cyclical)’ (1992, p. 395).
From this it follows that for Lefebvre (1992, p. 201), the body is both producer of
space and product of space. In the first case, it is a carnal/spatio-temporal body that is
in rebellion against the second body – the social body – which, with its dried-up
rationality, forgets that space does not coincide with intellectual representation and

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reduces it to a visible and readable fact. An uprising of the body, in short, against the
signs of non-body: ‘The history of the body in the final phase of Western culture is that
of its rebellions’ (ibid., pp. 200-201, quote from Paz, 1974, p. 132). In this respect, spatial
practices cannot be reduced either to an existing system (urban or ecological) or to
adaptation to a system (economic or political). What prevails in Lefebvre is a theatrical
concept of space, dramatized, which – thanks to the potential energies released –
diverts homogeneous space from its use. Considered from this perspective, Venice is
an exemplary case because is emblematic of the critique of the modern urban
experience which completely lacks this animated theatricality. In Lefebvre’s eyes,
Venice represents the fantasy of entertainment, of urban celebration: a vestige of
collective social space that resists the systematic destruction caused by capitalism.
Against ‘art cities’: The tourist mirage and the basis for a Venetian rhythmanalytic
experiment
If Venice is the quintessence of the production (and appropriation) of social space, then
some of the representations of its space must be deepened. In particular, the more recent
ones in which – with the advent of industrial capitalism and mass production – economic
exploitation has replaced oppression and creative capacity which is reduced to the
miniaturization of ‘doing’ or ‘creativity’. Following Lefebvre, in this historical passage, a
specific and decisive urban conflict takes place: one between the use value and the
exchange value of space. More precisely, for Venice this passage takes place through the
commodification of space for essentially tourist purposes: ‘The moment of creation is past;
indeed, the city’s disappearance is already imminent. Precisely because it is still full of life,
though threatened with extinction, this work deeply affects anyone who uses it as a source
of pleasure and in so doing contributes in however small a measure to its demise’ (1991, p.
74). In other words, Lefebvre combines the unstoppable decline of Venice with practices
that reduce the city to an ‘art object’. The more Venice is represented as an art object, the
more it moves away from the idea of the œuvre because: ‘art, as a specializing activity, has
destroyed works [œuvres, Editor’s note] and replaced them, slowly but implacably, by
products destined to be exchanged, traded and reproduced ad infinitum’ (ibid.).
As for the relationship between space and body, Lefebvre (ibid., p. 189, emphasis in
English translation) introduces the concept of mirage:
The power of a landscape does not derive from the fact that it offers itself a
spectacle, but rather from the fact that, as mirror and mirage, it presents any

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susceptible viewer with an image at once true and false of a creative capacity which
the subject (or Ego) is able, during a moment of marvellous self-deception, to claim
as his [sic] own. A landscape also has the seductive power of all pictures, and this
is especially true on an urban landscape – Venice, for example – that can impose
itself immediately as a work (œuvre, Editor’s note). Whence the archetypal tourist
delusion of being a participant in such a work, and of understanding it completely,
even though the tourist merely passes through a country or countryside and absorbs
its image in a quite passive way, the work (œuvre, Editor’s note) in its concrete
reality, its products, and the productive activity involved are all thus obscured and
indeed consigned to oblivion.
This is a decisive point in starting my Venetian rhythmanalytic experiment. The effects of
the mirage have a great capacity for mystification: ‘under the conditions of modernity, as
absolute political space extends its sway, the impression of transparency becomes stronger
and stronger, and the illusion of a new life is everywhere reinforced’ (ibid.). These concepts
are useful to consider Venice as a place to develop a model of decoding urban space,
dialectically recovering the Nietzschean notions of visual metaphor and the Marxist notions
of the body as a guide, to criticize all the effects of the mirage that over time have reduced
thoughts and actions to mere abstractions. According to Jeffrey Veitch (2018; 2020), in The
Production of Space, Lefebvre uses the two German thinkers to build a relationship between
the senses and power. It is a relationship in which power is constituted in the form of social
and political structures aligned with ‘visibility through reason’ and is nourished by the implicit
logic of visual metaphors and their contribution to the formation and understanding of
‘common sense’:
The truth of space thus leads back (and reinforced by) a powerful Nietzchean
sentiment: ‘But may the will to truth mean this to you – that everything shall be
transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly evident, the humanly-
palpable! You should follow your own senses to the end. Marx, for his part, called
in the Manuscripts of 1844 for the senses to become theoreticians in their own right.
The revolutionary road of the human and the heroic road of the superhuman meet
at crossroads of space. Whether they then converge is another story’ (Lefebvre,
1991, pp. 399-400).

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Lefebvre (2014, p. 125) invites us to consider that the body, with its senses, manages to
escape the effects of mirages, reveals itself as an instrument of critical thinking and
proposes subversive strategies towards the state and its power over the work (see Borelli,
2020; Lyon, 2019; Chen, 2018).
Moments and the ‘tourist mirage’
Despite its secular invariance, Venice’s ability to resist the usurpation of its spaces by the
homogenising force of mass tourism is now at its limits. The city is mortally wounded by the
processes of suburbanisation, gentrification and trivial spectacle that certify the inevitable
drift that afflicts all art cities. Cultural policies quickly turned into the poisoned fruit of Venice.
Those same proposals, which then took the form of policies to strengthen the Biennale, the
Civic Museums and a wide and varied range of institutional and non-institutional, public and
private cultural activities, encouraged the explosion of the tourist phenomenon. As a direct
consequence, the other economic bases of the city (fishing, craft and trade) vanished, as
did the spaces of everyday life, the 'animated theatricality' that had so fascinated Lefebvre.
This shift was effectively captured with foresight by Jean-Paul Sartre (1991, p.166). In his
diary of his trip to Italy in the autumn of 1951, the existentialist philosopher writes: ‘there is
no city in the world that is not populated with cadavers, it is enough just to spread a little tourist
insecticide [...] the tourist is a man [sic] of resentment. He kills. He doesn’t feel the Venetians
that he touches, he doesn’t see them’. Sartre accurately captures the effects of the tourist
mirage in Venice: an idle province, protected by industry and at the same time a cultural place
that wears the international myth that others have sewn onto it, while, in the everyday reality
that Sartre observes, its inhabitants are a «small provincial crowd enjoying childish spectacles
in a greying city» (ibid.). This notation of Sartre, recorded on the evening of his arrival in
Venice, is intriguing:
Under the lion’s column, people are gathered around a few young men who are
drunk more on words and songs than wine. The young men are in civilian clothes
but have the feathered hats of the bersaglieri [speciality of the Italian Army’s infantry
corps]. All of this smells of the province. A calm and sad province that rarely has
distractions. Strange Venice: they give it the newest films, sumptuous dances, a first
edition of a Stravinsky’s opera, and it watches some of the bersaglieri’s children
dancing, who presumably went to a banquet in the morning. It means that these are

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its distractions after all. The others are for foreigners’ (Sartre, 1991, my translation
from French).
Sartre’s acute reflections offer us an explanatory key to take note of how the art city of
Venice, overwhelmed by tourist and cultural exploitation, has proved incapable of continuing
the dialectical synthesis in which historically the œuvre and the product coexisted to produce
a collective social space resilient to institutional power and economic commodification
(Borelli, Busacca, 2018, pp. 124-125). Today the Venetian institutional, economic and social
system is totally saturated with the production of exchange value: the tourist monoculture of
Venice exerts a hegemony which, in its own way, is equally oppressive to that of the
Repubblica Serenissima (Most Serene Republic of Venice). However, unlike in the past, the
Venetian political regime is now completely incapable of stimulating creativity and œuvres
because it is entirely oriented towards the circulation of products destined for consumption
and the making of profit. This is because, although the surplus value generated by the
current ‘Venetian mode of production’ still represents a particularly favourable condition for
the accumulation of considerable wealth, it is no longer socialized as in the past. While in
the era before the advent of industrial capitalism, the surplus value produced in Venice was
mainly realized and spent on the spot – in the production of ‘theatrical’ public spaces and
lavish rituals and festivals, which made the lagoon city an eternal work of art – today Venice
appears literally plundered by the dictatorship of tourism and hospitality and prey to the
social anomie produced by the ‘ectoplasm of the second home, which materialize with great
pomp and worldliness, then disappear into the nothing for months’ (Settis, 2014, my
translation).
In Lefebvrian terms, Sartre’s account coincides with the ability to recognize and report
particular moments in present-day Venetian experience. The moments that are experiences
coincide not only as states of intense awareness of everyday life, but also as occasions that
offer the possibility of a critique of everyday life itself. Intended as differential experiences in
daily life – as a ‘possible’ – the moments shed understanding of the states of alienation into
which capitalist society has plunged us. On this subject, the Rugagiuffa group’s short movies
(which I present in the next section), use irony to build a collection of moments from everyday
Venetian life. Through the awareness of the rhythms to which the body is subjected, we
night fully grasp the training (dressage) that capitalism puts into action not only with regard
to the strategies through which mass tourism forms its legions, but above all to understand
how, through the logic of profit, it acts as a system that is built on manipulation and disregard

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for the body and its rhythms. Thus, just as Lefebvre had been intrigued, during his summer
walks, by the remarkable crucifixes located at the crossroads of the walkways in his native
Vallée du Gave d’Oloron in the Pyrenees, and how he had fully matured from them the
moment caused by the soleil crucifié (Lefebvre, 2009, pp. 243-258) as an awareness of the
state of alienation produced by the Catholic religion – bigot and retrograde. In a similar way,
the Venetian events of the Rugagiuffa show how in Venice, as in all major tourist cities in
the world, the bodies that inhabit and pass through them are similar to those of a ventriloquist
who speaks ‘only because it is the (tourist) institution that speaks through them, because
they literally have it ‘under their skin’’ (Lourau, 1969 p. 12, the text in parenthesis is mine).
In this way, if Lefebvre’s theory of moments represents the foundation for the criticism of
everyday life, the theory of rhythms completes it by proposing itself as its methodological
foundation.
Impossible Venice: the moments and rhythms of Rugagiuffa
Lefebvre shared an empirical experimentation of his analytical method by looking out of the
window of his apartment in Rue Rambuteau, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, and
observing the crowded bustle around the then newly built Centre Pompidou. Here we get a
glimpse of everyday Venetian life through our monitor by visiting the Rugagiuffa’s YouTube
site (https://www.youtube.com/user/RugagiuffaWebSeries).
Rugagiuffa is a self-produced comic web series broadcast on YouTube from 2014 to 2018
by a group of young Venetians: Pala, a graduate in restoration chemistry, is often looking
for work, Gloria is Erasmus student, Silvio manages his brother Ivan’s houses, Fra is another
student, Mala is looking for a job, Lorenz eventually moves to Spain, and Ivan is the owner
of several houses. Originally started as a joke by its authors/protagonists, Rugagiuffa soon
became popular within and beyond the Venetian context. Rugagiuffa tells the story of the
daily life of a group of friends and students (see Figure 1) struggling with the difficulties faced
by those who live in the lagoon city and have to deal with a very different reality from the
one presented by the tour operators: a lack of rental property, unemployment, debasing job
prospects and strictly off-the-books work, ‘all without that postcard patina with which Venice
is usually told’ (interview with film director, Silvio Franceschet, 2017).
INSERT Figure 2 HERE

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The web series takes its name from Rugagiuffa, a Venetian calle (street) in the Sestiere
of Castello district (Figure 2) where the home of one of the protagonists of the series is
located and where the first series was recorded. Three seasons of the web series have been
made, including a total of 21 episodes (seven per season) with a duration ranging from four
to 16 minutes. According to the film director: ‘telling stories through images in Venice is very
difficult, in every shot you run the risk of creating a postcard image [...] For this reason in the
first season the protagonists almost never leave the house. When the characters began to
be more defined and no longer run the risk of being crushed by the aesthetics of the city,
we began to go out and shoot outdoors’ (ibid.).
The fear of ‘being crushed by the aesthetics of Venice’ is of particular interest here. It
seems that the young characters of Rugagiuffa are particularly uneasy about the manifest
commodification of Venetian space for essentially tourist purposes. The ‘fear of leaving
home’ could be explained by the fear that the space-time rhythms of the protagonists (who
claim the value of use of Venetian space and their right to the realization of a space of
jouissance [pleasure], built around their desires for emancipation), may succumb to the
homogenising power of world tourism which, in the name of the exchange value of space,
imposes its own ‘linear, unyrhythmic, measured/measuring’ rhythm (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 5,
passim). In this respect, Rugagiuffa’s initial refusal to include Venetian space in their stories
is an indicator of the malaise felt by Venetians in feeling totally immersed in a spectacle that
offers a spectacle of itself, an illusory image (a mirage, precisely) that functions as a mirror
for all Ego-tourists. What Rugagiuffa call the ‘postcard-image’ is the result of the mirror effect
of the commodification of Venetian space: it is the product of the imagination of the Ego-
tourist who attributes her/himself a creative capacity that deceives, convincing her/him to
possess such power (hence the mirror effect). Mirage and mirror effects produce the illusion
of tourism, because the tourist passes with his/her body through and not in space and
passively receives an image of it. The unequal and unaware disproportion of mass tourism
in Venice hides and swallows into the oblivion of the selfie (Parr, 2015; 2018) both the
concrete product and the jouissance proper to the œuvre and the unproductive waste of the
play. In this perspective, the commodity takes everything and space and social time become
the space of markets and exchange.
In a Venetian representation of this kind – completely compromised by commodification
and alienation – the practice of rhythmanalysis allows us not only to acknowledge that there
are rhythms, but to illustrate the causes and effects of the interaction between time, space

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and the energy produced by the bodies of Rugagiuffa’s characters in those times and
spaces. Through the window of our computer we observe (but it would be more precise to
say: we feel through our bodies) the political order that reigns in Venice, the omnipresent
commodification of art, space and time, and we can advance ideas about the forms and
gestures that power (that is, the state and the market) has inscribed in Venetian time and
space. Let us focus our attention on a couple of episodes below.
Venice is beautiful but I wouldn’t live and work there
Since the flood of November 1966, the lagoon centre has lost about 70,000 residents (more
than half: from 121,000 to 51,000). The tourist-hotel monoculture and the ‘second home
ectoplasms’ (Settis, 2014), have played a significant role in this affair. Among the effects of
this is the difficulty of finding both a decent job and a reasonably priced home.
In Episode 2 of the third season, the group of friends find themselves in need of a new
home in Venice. One of the possible options is to contact Pala’s aunt, who owns several
apartments in the city. Pala is reluctant to make the call because he already foresees a
refusal from his aunt (‘she only rents to tourists’, he says), but his friends insist until they
convince him to make the call. The aunt, lying comfortably in a petticoat in her bed (Figure
3), answers that she is just starting work and will call back as soon as she finishes. Without
getting out of bed, the aunt opens her laptop and frantically consults her online bank account
(with a balance of around 300,000 euros), until, a moment later, a Russian tourist credits
her with more than 12,000 euros. Then the aunt exclaims: ‘Over! What a devastating month’,
she puts her laptop away and calls her nephew back. After the pleasantries, Pala gets to
the point in question:
Pala: Well, since we decided to live together, we thought maybe one of your
apartments would be available...
Auntie: Eh... I can’t. I just can’t afford it. I’d love to help you and your friends, but
you understand: the taxes, the rents that don’t come. I can barely put two bits away
on tourist rentals. I mean, I’d love to, but I can’t afford it...
Pala: Yeah, I guess this is not good for you. We’ll find another solution, thank you.
Auntie: Never mind: You were right to try. Ciao, my love! (author’s own translation)
INSERT Figure 3 HERE

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Episode 6 of the third season explores the problem of work in Venice. Leaving aside the
predictable jobs of the two protagonists (Gloria is a waitress in a Venetian bacaro and Fra
gives revision lessons in chemistry, Latin, mathematics, physics, Italian and French to high
school students, as well as offering herself as a babysitter and dog sitter), the unlikely
ambitions of Pala, who thinks he can support himself with social media, and the story of
Mala are striking.
We see Mala taking part in a job interview in pure corporate style, involving a
psychologist. With frankness in answering questions and thanks to his hasty ways of doing
things, Mala gets the long-awaited job. Subsequently, we see him intent on replacing the
label ‘Made in PRC’ with that of ‘Murano Glass. Made in Italy’ on a myriad of kitsch objects.
He is selling them from a stall located in Campiello della Malvasia (Figure 4), having been
entrusted with this responsibility. Mala is deeply ashamed of this work and, when Gloria
casually passes in front of the stall and recognizes her friend, he asks her not to say anything
to anyone. The climax of the episode is the moment of the video call that the CEO of the
company makes to Mala from the edge of a pool, while sipping a drink and dancing with a
young woman:
CEO: How’s work? Transformation, initiative, change: these are the secrets of
success. Dig it?
Mala: Mmmh, yes...
CEO: And how’s work? What’s my apprentice doing?
Mala: I’ve just changed the labels.
CEO: Let me see... Good, good, that’s it. Be gentle, because I don’t trust that
fucking glue, they come off and it’s a mess. What kind of music do you have? I
can’t hear anything.
Mala: Right now no music.
CEO: Wrong! Music always. Two genres: Latino-American or smash hit [the CEO
dances with a young woman]. If you want all this, you have to work hard!
INSERT Figure 4 HERE
Rugagiuffa is a bittersweet mise-en-scène of the ability of the tourist monoculture to take
possession of daily life and its relationship with residents at various levels. The space and
time of Rugagiuffa coincide with commodities and contain within them some rhythms. The

14. 14
daily life of the protagonists is subsumed within the Venetian tourist-commercial spectacle
to the point of imposing, in spite of themselves, a high degree of consensus, adherence,
commitment and integration.
Rhythmanalysis and some methodological remarks: observation and implication in
everyday life in Venice
The type of observation practiced here brings back into vogue the debate about the
traditional methods of observation, both in terms of the researcher’s field behaviour and in
the value of the descriptions and interpretations of the data collected and described by the
researcher. If we take up the reflection of the anthropological terminology that adopted the
two terms etic and emic – originally proposed by Kenneth Pike (1967) – and translated
respectively in the way people belonging to a culture understand its conceptions and
manifestations (emic) and in the attitude and evaluations of those who act as external
observers of any culture (etic), then the Venetian rhythmanalytic practice questions the
deep-rooted conviction that these two positions must necessarily be considered as
antithetical. On the one hand, the observation of a culture relies in part on the observer’s
distance. This distance detaches him/her from the observed subjects and at the same time
involves him/her in the etic condition of each external observer. On the other hand, it is not
enough to belong to a culture and to be a conscious bearer of it to ensure reliability.
However, since the distinction between emic and etic is fundamental for research and
analysis, we cannot escape the fact that the term ‘observation’ is already an oxymoron that
expresses the ambiguity of the method of observation that simultaneously implies the
distance of observation and the proximity of participation.
The political order that reigns in Rugagiuffa – the omnipresent commodification of
everyday life – is not seen only through YouTube, but ‘looms over this present’ (Lefebvre,
2004, p. 32): our capacity for observation is therefore forced to wander between the
observation of the rhythms of the protagonists and the critique of society. The succession of
these alternations and repetitions, of differences, suggests to the observer that this present
is ordered by something that comes from elsewhere (which is not visible through YouTube).
To capture this presence, the observation of rhythms urges us to use our senses as a
receptor and our body as a term of reference.
Here the notion of ‘implication’ proposed by Lefebvre (2004, p. 33) as a fundamental part
of the practice of rhythmanalysis is useful: ‘the implication in the spectacle entails the
explication of this spectacle’. This point introduces some very relevant questions about the

15. 15
level of involvement of the observer. As René Lourau (1991, p. 9) comments in his
introduction to the Éléments de rythmanalyse, the original French publication of the book,
the work of observation is an interminable, incomplete and uncertain practice that can hardly
come to terms with the indeterminacy of the observed situation. The result of observation
does not consist in ‘explanation’ as in classical logic, but introduces us to the analysis of
involvement as observers. It more or less explains the observer’s place ‘within the
spectacle’, and in so doing provides some illumination of the world (and/or its
representations). To recognize these implications is to perform a significant part of social
and analytic analysis because the many obstacles to such recognition are the real challenge
of analytic work.
All these difficulties can be found in the observation of the events of the Rugagiuffa. In
the rhythms of the protagonists' bodies, it is possible to read the irreducible conflict between
the social body and the carnal body. This is a conflict between the political-economic
rationality that reduces everything to a pre-established order and the forms of spontaneity
and self-management that try to produce differential spaces in it to escape the clichés that
the commodification of time and space imposes. The acute problem that arises in the case
of the Rugagiuffa is that the dialectical movement between the two bodies causes multiple
distortions in space and time that can also degrade into ideology, fetishize and produce a
false consciousness, exacerbating in particular the conflict between time and space. In the
terms of the etical/emical dyad, a rhythmanalytic practice brings out the great difficulty of
operating a dialectical synthesis between the emical representation of the Venetian
carnal/total body and the etical representation of the same. In the Venetian case, the etical
representation coincides with the perspective of a stranger who ‘looks inside’: it may be the
case of a tourist who visits Venice for its ‘romantic’ character, but contributes to the
representation of a space that does not care at all to integrate itself in the local culture it is
intercepting. Conversely, an emic representation of the body is realized around a set of
cultural and spatial practices that are intrinsic and significant for the members of the
community of which the body is a part. This is, for example, the case of an inhabitant of
Venice who ‘is inside the city’ and is active in the daily production of spaces built around the
details, indeed the minutiæ of culturally rich practices and beliefs, but that etical
representations systematically fail to capture or mystify. While this can be said to be a fairly
common problem for many places, what makes this problem particularly severe in Venice is
not in terms of the manifest prevalence of one of the two bodies (the bodies of tourists are
suffocating the bodies of residents), but in the coexistence of both possible representations

16. 16
in each individual Venetian carnal body. The etical body of the tourist, like a parasite, inserts
itself into the resident’s body and infects it from the inside, bending it to behaviours and
rhythms that are typical of the tourist monoculture and that reverberate in the most hidden
meanderings of daily life. Likewise, the etical body of the tourist places itself above the
resident’s emic body and the space it produces, ‘corrects’ it and ‘translates’ it into its own
categories, claiming to be mirrored in the mirage of the ‘truth’ of the place and society.
Conclusions
The window opened on calle Rugagiuffa by the YouTube series should be understood as
the moment in which the rhythmanalyst/researcher confronts others and their rhythms.
Unlike a phenomenological analysis I have not limited myself here to consider that in Venice
‘there are rhythms’, or that some rhythms are produced within a given situation. My aim has
been not to qualify these rhythms specifically, but to illustrate their causes and their effects
in the interaction between time, space and the energy produced by bodies in those times
and spaces. This interaction pushes us to use the body as a receiver: to grasp a rhythm, we
need to be grasped by it, we need to let ourselves go, indulge, surrender to its duration. This
means that as researchers we are inevitably involved in and affected by our research
activity.
Through the recognition of the implication of the participating observer, rhythmanalysis
implies a methodological freedom. It is methodologically nomadic, and refuses to lock itself
within disciplinary boundaries that would limit its trajectories. It is based on the
understanding of social experiences as reverberant and resonant and fully immersed in the
social phenomena. In the case of Rugagiuffa, however, one point remains open: that of the
mediated relationship with the observed situation. Unlike Lefebvre’s window overlooking
Rue Rambuteau, the window from which I observed the events of the young Venetians is
through a YouTube page. The problem this poses is not so much the challenge of dealing
adequately with the dichotomy between real and virtual observation, but that of the actual
ability to discern between reality and fiction. That is to say: to what extent can we assume
the rhythms in Rugagiuffa to be ‘authentic’? How can we be sure that the likeable
protagonists are not deliberately manipulating 'reality' by representing (I put this term in
italics to emphasize the depth of its meaning) their everyday lives as a parody?
In the first instance, the problem of assessing the reliability of the protagonists arises: we
are well aware that in any representation of everyday life, there is always room for deception
(and self-deception). However, we must consider that, in this mediated relationship with the

17. 17
young Venetian protagonists, we are implicated as observers because they actively involve
us in the representation of the self. In Rugagiuffa, the relationship between fictional
characters and their real counterparts is so close that the events we witness are immediately
comprehensible to the point of encouraging us to activate processes of identification,
understanding the motivations and the social context in which these events take place. At
this point, in the words of Lefebvre (2004, p. 33), the open window on YouTube ‘ceases to
be a mental place on which the gaze lingers as if in front of a spectacle’. Rugagiuffa presents
itself to our gaze as a mentally prolonged perspective: it takes us beyond the confines of
entertainment and actively and totally involves us in a plurality of rhythmic interactions that
provide a living representation of everyday Venetian life. It matters little whether the rhythms
of Rugagiuffa are ‘real’ or not: they are ‘plausible’, because they give meaning to social
relations; they point to themes and problems on the basis of critical issues that come from
Venetian spatial practices. Rugagiuffa offers the possibility that the receiver/viewer can
negotiate its meaning with the protagonists and carry out an exercise of understanding from
the particular to the general. The rhythmanalytical experiment then consists of the possibility
of ‘taking the images for what they are: simulacra, copies conforming to a standard, parodies
of presence’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 23).
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19. 19
Figure 1 The main characters of the web series Rugagiuffa (from left: Lorenz, Pala, Gloria and Mala).
Figure 2 The calle Rugagiuffa in Venice

20. 20
Figure 3 A Venetian landlady: Pala’s aunt
Figure 4 The last good work in Venice: Mala and the shoddy goods Made in PRC