Autogrill is truly surprising. It has been, as I have previously written (G. Fabris 2004) one of the most expressive magnetic locations in the modern era, and yet it also has all the credentialsfor an entry into the new era – the era of the postmodern, the era toward which we aremoving, despite the fact that this era is characterized by a distinct new sense of

distance, a sharp break with everything that we are leaving behind us.

This may also signify the rapid obsolescence, even the rejection, of its most significant icons. Unquestionably, Autogrill has been one of those icons. Because Italy’s autogrills – this time with a lower-case ‘a,’ as a generic term describing a highway rest, dining, and refreshment facility – were Italy’s bellwethers not only of fast food and quick eating, but also of free service. And, in more general terms, of models ofconsumption and lifestyles that marked a profound shift from the country’s preindustrial tradition. Because in postwar Italy, when supermarkets were still something looming in the future, autogrills – which is already intrinsically bound up with two elements that at the time exerted an extraordinary pull in terms of allure and prestige: automobiles and highways – were truly emblematic of modernity, symbols of the American way of life that so interested the Italians. While some chains considered service areas as a sort of pragmatic venue just for the purchase of gasoline, autogrills already incorporated in their architectural design those design elements that, on a symbolic level, consecrated their attraction and their popularity. The structure of the buildings could not be likenedto any other building type: the streamlining soared toward the sky, as in some venerable cathedral, in a blend of the functional and the Baroque, combining modernity and efficiency with features of the local country festival. And above all, they consecrated the new and prestigious status of the motorist. They presented themselves like so many balconies overlooking the highway – which stillembodied that thrilling idea of progress and the future with which the Futurists had invested it –and they conveyed with a triumphal display of banners, vivid colors, neons, and saloon-styleswinging doors those elements of modernity and cosmopolitanism that were for such a longperiod successful characteristics in an Italy that wanted to move as quickly as possible awayfrom the rural, provincial, and pre-industrial culture in which it was still so deeply steeped.Modernity, at the time, expressed itself in part with the openly avowed absence of a numberof the fundamental foods of the Italian culinary tradition – bread and pasta – which werereplaced by canned soups, like Campbell’s, and crackers, in obeisance to a perceived heightened practicality that was needed in a motorist’s meal. The preparation of the food – with grilling, featured in the signs and the names of the chain, as a core technique, reminiscent of the petty bourgeois apotheosis of sociability with friends on one’s home patio or backyard – banished many of the methods that were consecrated by Italian tradition. Selfservice was a forerunner of free service, just as the simplification of the meal pointed the way toward the fast-food outlets of the future. The hygiene, the spotless uniforms of the efficient and courteous staff – so different from theunpretentious slovenliness of the local restaurants and trattorias – and the abundance of advertising all converged to ensure the success of the autogrills. These were the new temples of opulence – genuine cathedrals in the desert – but for this very reason alluring to the new arrivals in thenew consumer society. Even the names of the new service areas seemed to rewrite, in consumers terms, the geography of the country. Then came the major highway spanning bridge structures, the restaurants – some of which could be characterized as genuine dining spots for gourmets – but, above all, the markets, which offered a successful mix of characteristic local products, artisanal andindustrial specialty goods, and ordinary necessities. And certainly the continuous flirtation with the Baroque – one of the distinctive appellations of post-modern society is, in fact, Neo-Baroque Society – also constituted the handover of the baton, as if in a relay race, toward a second, impetuous youth. In the new age as well. Consumption and the consumer are a highly sensitive litmus test of social change. We can in fact see reflected in the consumer – and let us not forget that consumers are always individuals even when they spend money, make use of products or services, and they are certainly not “other than themselves,” as economic theory has always attempted toconvince us (and we continue to call them consumers in order to find ourselves makinguse of more complex, and equally misleading, terms, such as individual-consumer or citizenconsumer) – the most expressive features of a number of major elements of the postmodern.A consumer who has already consolidated a number of the most important accomplishments of the era of modernity – freeing himself from the näiveness, lack of preparation, and ingenuousnessof the beginning, proving to be more expert, exacting, selective, and attentive to details, hard to please – and who operates with a great  nonchalance in the variegated archipelago of consumption. A secular and disenchanted consumer, autonomous and responsible, aware that forms of consumption are by now also a kind of language with which it is possible to communicate, both to oneself and to others, sections of one’s identity and one’s state of mind or the moods of the  moment; who has an unabashed and often playful relationship with merchandise; and yet is still capable of new enchantments that have nothing in common with the fetishism of merchandise;who makes enthusiastic use – though for purposes that are radically at variance with thesignificances attributed by manufacturers and by instructions for use – of the goods profferedby the market, but is still far away from the frenzied consumerism that marked a numberof phases of his own past. [....] by G. Fabris (Skira 2008)