There was a time when discos in Italy strived to amaze. The Tuculca in Martinsicuro, a town in Abruzzo, boasted two Siberian tigers kept in cages to provide dancefloor shock and awe. Some of its rivals countered with glass cases filled with snakes before animal rights groups put a stop to the practice.
The Ultimo Impero, in Piemonte, was built on four floors. Inside there were nine bars, seven fountains and two artificial waterfalls.
The famous Cocoricò in Riccione, which could cram 3,000 customers into themed rooms with names like Ciao Sex and Morphone, used to be renovated twice a year: winter and summer. People went just to see how it had been restyled.
But now the major change in Italy’s dance and nightclub industry is downsizing. Silb-Fipe, a union representing the discos, says that 40 years ago there were between 8,000 and 9,000 nightclubs dotted across Italy, a figure that peaked in the 1990s.
Then the decline began, rooted in the 2008 world financial crash but also in generational shifts, changes to the music industry and then Covid. By 2023, polls showed the number of people expressing interest in Italy’s nightclubs had declined by 20% from pre-pandemic levels set only four or five years earlier.
The surviving discos numbered only 3,500 at best. Some clubs were shuttered, hoping to revive in better times. Others were demolished, others abandoned.
This brings us to Simone Nanetti, an IT technician and part-time photographer. He specialises in abandoned nightclubs, having travelled all around the country to document what remains of what were once considered as temples of fun. He’s one of the authors of Disco Mute: Abandoned Nightclubs in Italy, a book of photographs edited by Alessandro Tesei and Davide Calloni, founders of the Ascosi Lasciti (Hidden Legacies) website, a project to rediscover and record forgotten or hidden places through urban exploration (better known as “urbex”).
Nanetti told me that in their pomp, the prestige of the discos could be deduced from the flyers used to advertise them. “The further you found them from the nightclub itself, the more impressive it was,” he said. “I’m from Bologna: in my home town I remember seeing flyers for discos in the Riviera Romagnola, more than 10km away.
“But even though it was far away, people used to go there for the night. By bus. They would leave around 6 or 8 in the evening, dance from midnight, one in the morning until six in the morning, and come back more or less at noon”.
During his travels in Italy to document these discos’ decline and fall, Nanetti also returned to a number of places he had visited when the beat was still strong. One is the J&J in Ferrara, Emiglia-Romana, which closed in 2012.
“Thousands of people danced there at the same time,” he said. “Like other clubs of the time, there were several dance floors for different kinds of music. Otherwise, you could chill out in the garden: it was huge”. Another club he photographed was the Moxie, where for a while a live orchestra and disco music coexisted. And the Majorca, in Lombardia, whose dance floor was “as big as an Olympic-size swimming pool”.
All these places had to make a lot of money in order to balance their expenses, which were high: the furniture was detailed, the design was studied by architects and the electricity consumption was high. Most of them were open all night, every night.
Then, he says, “the 2008 crisis reduced economic availability for almost everyone. The amount of money young adults had for themselves was less compared to that of their parents. The entertainment industry was among the first ones impacted by this reduction in purchasing power”,
When the market changed and people started to choose cheaper forms of entertainment, discos had to reorganise. “The owners started to close some areas to avoid the feeling of emptiness. We see the same approach in many contemporary clubs: the dance floor is often very small,” Nanetti explains.
Moxie, formerly known as
Vallechiara, in the heart of Riccione’s
tourist centre
The changes in the industry also had an impact on the DJs. Angelo Mazzeo played in several clubs in Campania, in the south of Italy. Among them was the East Side, considered one of the most famous in the area.
“In the 1980s and ’90s every disco offered different kinds of music,” he said. “Right now, the market has become compartmentalised: people choose among specialised clubs, each offering one type of music.
“In addition, the equipment needed to work as a DJ has been completely transformed. The DJ would go to music stores and listen to tons of new albums. Then he would buy the ones he liked, spending a lot of money, and play his own selection of music. Now everyone has access to files that are much cheaper.
“This change has its advantages and disadvantages, of course. The main pro is that music is much more widely distributed and listened to. The con is the risk of standardisation: years ago, every DJ was different”
He’s not nostalgic, though: “I think this is how transformation works,” Mazzeo says. “Everything changes, and evolves, everywhere and every time”.
Disco Mute: Abandoned Nightclubs in Italy is published by Magenes.
The Ascosi Lasciti (Hidden Legacies) website is at ascosilasciti.com
Elisa Cornegliani is a journalist based in Milan
