In the land of the “middle-ness”

The “Cultural Fracture” between nostalgia, popular games and archaeology

Abstract

Starting from field research carried out in the surrounding the Cassino FIAT Plant, here I will describe and compare two ways of recounting the past: popular games that refer to a very vague medieval theme and important discoveries of Roman archaeology. What these two forms of local identity construction have in common is that they both insist on the need to repair a cultural fracture that frames the advent of the factory as the beginning of a decay embodied by the birth of the so-called metalmezzadro. Neither worker nor peasant and thus escaping the model of a well-circumscribed identity, the metalmezzadro shows all the negative characteristics of the precarious worker. In doing so, the cultural fracture carries risks of stigmatization and exclusion since the erasure of the metalmezzadro from the local landscape also presupposes the disappearance of the possibility of explicating his problems and needs in public space.