When Jovanotti sang the maranza in 1988. The definition of the Accademia della Crusca and the true (harmless) roots of the term.
The glare of broken windows in via Turinthe smoke from tear gas and a cloud of dark shapes fleeing with full hands towards the side streets of the center. In recent days, the news in Milan and other cities have reported lightning-fast attacks on clothing stores and supermarkets, raids born from the tom-tam on social media that the media immediately cataloged under a single, hasty label: the maranza.
Yet, using this word to describe contemporary metropolitan violence and anger is a gigantic historical misunderstanding. Maranza did not arise as a threat to public order, has no violent origins and does not belong to crime news. Before being transformed by algorithms into a synonym for social alarm, it indicated a sunny, noisy, brazen and completely harmless urban tribe that populated a radically different Milan.
The rude and proud response to the sandwich makers of San Babila
To understand who Maranza really was, we need to go back to the heart of the Eighties. At the time, non-EU immigration was almost non-existent: the Lombard metropolis was instead the landing point for internal immigration, with families arriving from Puglia, Campania, Calabria and Sicily who had now put down roots. In the working-class neighborhoods, but also in the commercial streets of the city and not only on the extreme edges, a youth was growing up who did not recognize themselves at all in the aristocratic hedonism of the sandwiches.
If in San Babila the pastel-coloured Moncler down jacket, the immaculate Timberland shoes and the snobbish air of the good guys dominated, on the other side of the road there was the maranza. He was the male proud of it, the brazen antithesis of the “rooster”: Maybe a bit of a loud boor, boastful in his manners and dialect, who sought aesthetic and verbal provocation but always within a challenge of customs. There was no ferocity, there were no knives or predatory gangs; at most there was the desire to be noticed on the wall, laughing loudly and occupying the public space with an overwhelming physicality.
The ritual of the car radio and the baptism of the Marantz amplifier
Even the etymology tells of that world of ostentation and decibels. If linguistics traces hybridization with southern dialect roots such as maranza (the aubergine, used jokingly to allude to the origins of the South), the living memory of the Milanese squares preserves an exquisitely technological and musical explanation: the glorious era of the members Marantz.
In those years, for the young man who wanted to get noticed there was no more powerful business card than the car radio. Small cars were transformed into mobile listening rooms, with power amplifiers and amplifiers pushed well beyond the threshold. Mounting a Marantz system and lowering the windows to make the metal shake to the rhythm of Italian dance or commercial dance was a declaration of presence. From audiophile brand to nickname for anyone who passed by skidding and “blasting the bass”, the step in Milanese jargon was almost automatic.
Bright bombers against the total black of skinny jeans
The clearest contrast with the present lies precisely in the wardrobe. The Maranza of the Eighties and Nineties was a visual explosion: he wore the voluminous bomber jacket with orange lining or oversized denim jackets, tight t-shirts with gold chains rigorously displayed on his hairy chest, massive sneakers and an industrial quantity of gel in his hair, pulled back or sculpted in a spiky fashion. He was kitsch, flashy, genuinely crass, but he laughed and wanted to dance on Sunday afternoons in discos open to minors.
Today’s Maranza, however, has erased every trace of that pop warmth to wear a dark and camouflage uniform. The contemporary uniform is monochromatic: black sweatshirts with hoods pulled over the head, dark windproof windbreakers, technical fanny packs worn over the shoulder, hugging the chest. Below, the generational trademark: black and ripped skinny jeanstight up to the ankle, or dark technical suits in acetate, combined with running shoes with aggressive profiles.
The social registry has also changed: today the term is applied, often with contempt, to second generation kids, mainly of Maghreb origin, who grew up in the shadow of satellite tower blocks and united by the raw codes of drill and trap. A universe where music is no longer an afternoon disco soundtrack, but a story of revenge, isolation and sometimes metropolitan anger.
The word maranza has thus slipped down an inclined plane: born to good-naturedly make fun of the noisy, noisy boy full of gold chains who challenged the respectability of the paninari with blows of the car radio, it ended up baptizing the protagonists of an increasingly tense urban news story. Two very distant worlds, united only by four syllables that Milan has recycled, forgetting the smile and the innocent caciara of forty years ago.
