Silvia Avallone’s Acciaio and the Industrialized Spaces of the Tuscan Coast: Place, Corporeality, and Female Agency

Silvia Avallone’s Acciaio (2010) explores the intimate lives of two teenage girls living in the socially and economically disadvantaged outskirts of the Tuscan coastal city of Piombino. The text also concerns the girls’ male relatives, many of whom work in the local steel plant, the Lucchini. Avallone’s novel empathetically portrays the girls’ struggle in terms of their class, sexuality and age. This essay examines the text’s reliance on spatial tropes to depict the inequality of the girls’ situation, with the squalid high-rise flats in which they reside and the steel factory encapsulating their sense of entrapment. Yet while the contrasting spatial tropes of industrial urban periphery, versus the sea coast which Avallone employs, might seem relatively straightforward, the novel is dynamic and complex in its (ambiguous) exploration of the characters’ relationships with their bodies and their emerging identities. Acciaio returns frequently to standardized notions of beauty and seems not to problematize the objectification of women’s bodies in that it relies heavily on the male gaze, a technique which undermines what otherwise would appear to be a feminist project. At the same time, Avallone’s novel portrays a series of placeless places (Relph) which exist in symbiosis with the girls’ corporeality, thus dismantling standardized notions of the Tuscan idyll and endowing the girls with a degree of agency. This examination of the novel’s industrial setting avails of gender studies, eco-feminist, and spatial theory, as it investigates the relationship between the female subject and her surroundings in a lesser-known location: the steel industry and the working-class “ghetto” of Piombino.