Socrates: So then: should we say that the appropriate is that which when present makes things seem beautiful or makes things be beautiful, or neither?
Hippias: I think it’s what makes things seem beautiful. It is like when somebody puts on well- fitting clothes or shoes, even if he’s ridiculous, he is seem to be more beautiful [. . .]
Socrates: If, then, beauty is the cause of good, goodness would be generated by the beautiful. So it seems that we take seriously wisdom and everything that is beautiful because that which they produce and generate, the goodness, deserves to be pursued. Then maybe based on what we discover, the beautiful looks like the father [sic] of goodness.
(Plato, Hippias Major, pp. 294a, 297b)
Everybody in Grano would agree that Luana is a beautiful woman. She runs, together with her younger sister and their mother, a fine leather shop in one of the main commercial streets in Grano. The shop was established by her father almost 40 years ago and ever since then it has represented the main source of income for the entire family, bringing in more money even than her mother’s good salary as a teacher of Italian.
After completing secondary school, Luana never considered looking for another job or leaving Grano.
In her early forties, Luana considers herself quite attractive and does as much as possible for other people to notice this. She is quite tall, which for people here is a standard for beauty, as the local saying goes: Altezza metà bellezza (‘Height is half of beauty’). She remembers that it was during the first few years after completing her education that she started to believe that she had a lot of potential for essere (‘being’)
really beautiful. So she worked on her physical aspect in different ways: she first joined local gym classes, then changed her hairstyle peri-odically and improved her make- up techniques. Finally, she underwent several small aesthetic surgeries.1
Luana was fidanzata with Gabriele for several years. He was equally tall, dark- eyed, with curly dark hair and a large forehead. He had practiced bodybuilding as a hobby since his twenties, so when the couple used to walk together on Sunday afternoons many people agreed their appearance was uno spettacolo (stunning). As a common friend put it: ‘they were perfect’.
But two years ago, after a short period of living together, Luana broke their engagement and moved back to her mother’s. She felt she needed to start a new life. She felt she had become ‘more mature’ and autonomous. She stopped dyeing her dark black hair and started to spend more time looking after herself. Now she focuses more on try-ing out slightly new hairstyles and make- up until she finds a particu-lar style that more closely fits her idea of beauty. Luana follows a strict diet recommended by a nutritionist in Lecce, and her mother now also enjoys eating the raw greens, seeds and dry salads that Luana discov-ered on a recent trip to India. In 2014 Luana joined a pole- dancing class in Lecce. She is particularly excited about this new sport because it is developing muscles she did not know she had and strengthening her body even more.
In her work on the rise of the fitness culture in the Western world, sociologist Roberta Sassatelli relates the central place of the gym and fitness in Italian and European society to a particular awareness of one’s own body.2 She explains that, by engaging constantly in gymnastic activities, individuals are currently attempting to administer in a confi-dent and autonomous way the resources of their bodies. This represents a popular embodiment of the more elitist classical ideals of European culture – a pure and perfect body – in a modern context. Indeed, Luana has put this project at the centre of her life: she can spend €400– 500 a month on maintaining an attractive appearance, yet she works for almost five days a week in an average shop, like many other working people in Grano.3 For most of the year she only spends nights out with friends at the weekends . Three evenings a week she goes to the gym for two hours and has a late dinner with her mother. Luana then goes to her room to watch television and fall asleep.
Her busy everyday schedule does not allow Luana to spend too much time beautifying herself at home: ‘if you are taking constant care of yourself, you do not need too much time to take care of yourself at
home,’ she says. She just uses a few anti- wrinkle creams in the morning and before going to bed, combs her straight hair with a few firm gestures and never does her fingernails as her plastic nails last for at least two weeks. Luana also does not like jewellery, and hardly uses any accesso-ries other than her elegant Armani sunglasses; her beauty consists now in maintaining a perfect and strong body.
Her sister, Eva, has a quite different idea of beauty. She does every-thing that Luana does but on a much smaller scale: gym, regular visits to hairdressers and beauticians, and healthy diet. It is her married life and non- observant Catholicism that restrains Eva from expressing her beauty as blatantly as her sister. She has been married for nearly nine years and has two children, aged nine and six. Back in high school she had been considered to have the potential to be ‘a beauty’ someday: she had won a few beauty contests and many of her friends had encouraged her to follow a modelling career. However, she had wanted to marry the man she loved and have a ‘normal’ life. Her husband managed to obtain a good position in local administration and they started to enjoy a com-fortable married life.
Eva knows it is considered inappropriate to look ‘perfect’ when rushing your kids to school in the morning, or entering the greengrocers on the corner or the butchers. Instead, it is when she is going out with her family that she grooms herself more attentively and sometimes wears elegant clothes or uses more make- up. In many situations women do not leave home before spending a certain period of time beautifying them-selves and selecting their clothes, making sure their outfits are neat and that their family is equally well dressed. Dressing reflects the social and economic status they believe that they still have despite the recent eco-nomic difficulties, and social media have to reflect this. For most mar-ried women in Grano, the idea of personal beauty does not really make sense outside the family.
In general, married women in Grano could be described as hav-ing a less conspicuous, but constant and endurhav-ing, kind of beauty.
By not stressing too much their physical beauty, they instead express their status as wife and mother. In contrast to her married sister, Luana never dresses in the same clothes on two consecutive days; she arranges her hair in two or three different ways during the week and sometimes adds some eye- catching accessories such as a wide leather belt with a large metal buckle or a brand new pair of sunglasses. A mar-ried woman would not normally do any of this. She would probably be relaxed if in the morning she put on the same clothes as she wore the previous day as long as they were clean and she looked decent.
She would also rarely change her hairstyle in two consecutive visits to the hairdresser and, in general, would try not to attract attention to her appearance in any particular way. Spending one-third of the aver-age salary on maintaining an attractive appearance, as Luana does, is inconceivable for middle- class married women. They rather compen-sate for this cost and focus on appearance, which would be considered a luxury, by putting in extra work on maintaining a clean and neat appearance instead.
Now, with Facebook, women have another space where all these efforts can be made visible. For example, Luana does not upload photos of herself to Facebook very often and her profile is private. This means that she lets people know and admire her offline rather than online.
Actually she has little time to spend (andare) online, except during the summer when she likes uploading photos of time spent with friends. She uses the service mostly to make appointments with people she likes to spend time with. She does not like to see cose pesante (‘heavy things’) posted on Facebook, such as posts on the more philosophical thoughts or those that engage in political debates. She considers all these a waste of time.
Luana keeps just a few photos of herself public on Facebook. These were done by a friend who is a professional photographer. The photos are in black and white, and they show Luana in romantic dialogue with the spectacular scenery of the Adriatic coast: she is very well dressed and looks beautiful, but does not try to be ‘too’ attractive and never looks into the camera. In several of these photos her profile is photo-graphed against a century- old watchtower that guards the rocky coast.
However, Luana only engages with the majesty and uncontested beauty of nature in these photos that she has made public. In contrast, many of the pictures on her private Facebook profile show her photographed at close range, sunbathing in a bikini on a boat, or while drinking a fresh juice with friends.
This suggests that Luana embodies a project of beauty itself: pub-licly it can be admired from a distance, in less detail and sometimes as seen in harmony with the greatness of nature, while it is within a close circle of friends that Luana reveals her true self. This is consistent with Luana’s offline attitude. Her customers admire her beauty and profes-sionalism discretely when stepping into the shop while, during week-ends, summer holidays and with close friweek-ends, Luana reveals deeper aspects of her personality. This outlook is similar to that regarding reli-gious faith: we have seen that it is ‘normal’ to strive to be a good Catholic without necessarily showing this on Facebook.
It is this dual quality of her appearance that distinguishes Luana from other people in the community. Her preoccupation with looking attractive and fit is more like a craft, like painting, for example. The rule is you might let other people see the product of your work, but you pres-ent it as a craft. This project is in no way narcissistic because it is nor-mative. As we will see later in the chapter, it is the social duty of bravi (good) citizens to craft their physical appearance in a way that can be appreciated socially.4 This suggests that the use of social media should be seen in the larger context of the history and norms of the region.
Reading the following sections, we will see how these norms have made people work on themselves constantly and enjoy complimentary online public appreciations.