From Shame to Trust? Civic Trauma and Democratic Re-Legitimation in a Mediterranean Tourist Town

Abstract

In May 2025, Sorrento, a tourist destination in southern Italy, entered a severe political crisis following the arrest of its incumbent mayor on charges relating to public office. This article examines how the crisis was publicly interpreted and how the subsequent electoral process contributed to the renegotiation of political legitimacy. Drawing on ethnographic research combining participant observation, fieldnotes, local and social media monitoring, and observation of political meetings and debates, it traces public discourse between 2025 and 2026. Many residents interpreted the scandal through the local moral category of scuorno (shame), experiencing its public exposure as a form of civic trauma affecting the town’s collective reputation. The crisis also intensified scrutiny of political relationships, biographies, and governing practices, while digital media made local political memory increasingly retrievable and contestable. Rather than simply restoring trust, the electoral process exposed competing expectations concerning political proximity, transparency, accountability, and impartial procedure. The 2026 elections are therefore interpreted as a ritual of democratic re-legitimation: a publicly recognised procedure through which competing claims to political representation could be articulated, compared, and judged. The case shows how political scandal can expose different grounds of political trust and make their democratic legitimacy an object of public negotiation.

1. Introduction

In May 2025, the town of Sorrento in southern Italy, one of the Mediterranean’s best-known tourist destinations, was struck by an unprecedented political and moral crisis in its recent history. The arrest of the incumbent mayor on charges of serious offences against the public administration produced consequences that extended far beyond the legal and administrative dimensions of the case. At the centre of public debate was not simply the political fate of a single officeholder, but the reputation of the local community itself. For weeks, and in some respects for months, public discourse was dominated by feelings of embarrassment, disappointment, disorientation, and collective shame. In everyday conversations, on social media, in the local press, and in informal discussions, people repeatedly expressed the perception that the town had been exposed to humiliating external judgement and that the affair had compromised a public image painstakingly built over decades.

This collective reaction must be understood in light of Sorrento’s distinctive social profile. With just over fifteen thousand residents and several million tourist arrivals each year, the town occupies an unusual position within the Italian landscape. Its economy, symbolic prestige, and a substantial part of its collective identity depend upon its ability to present itself as a place of excellence, hospitality, and high quality of life. In contexts of this kind, where communities are continuously exposed to the gaze of outsiders, political scandals may affect not only institutions but also the collective representation of the community itself. The perceived damage may therefore extend beyond the municipal administration to encompass the town’s name, prestige, and public credibility.

This dimension is especially relevant in a locality whose contemporary identity is deeply intertwined with the production and management of its tourist image. As previous studies of Sorrento have shown (Fiorentino, 2014; Gugg, 2014, 2024), the town exists under conditions of constant exposure to external scrutiny. In such a context, reputation constitutes not merely a symbolic resource but an important component of the community’s economic and social functioning. Yet reputation and political trust should not be treated as equivalent. The scandal affected the town’s public image because it exposed Sorrento to external judgement, while at the same time raising a different question concerning the credibility, impartiality, and reliability of its political institutions. The two dimensions became closely intertwined in local discourse, but they remained analytically distinct.

This distinction is crucial because trust itself is not a unitary social phenomenon. As Luhmann (1979) argued, trust reduces social complexity and makes action possible under conditions of uncertainty. Political trust, however, also concerns expectations about the reliability and trustworthiness of institutions and political actors (Levi & Stoker, 2000). In this sense, confidence in public institutions depends not only upon familiarity or personal proximity but also upon expectations that public authority will be exercised according to procedures that are sufficiently predictable, impartial, and accountable (Rothstein & Teorell, 2008). A political scandal can therefore destabilise institutional trust by casting doubt on the rules and procedures through which public authority is exercised.

Such a distinction becomes particularly important in small communities, where political life is embedded in dense networks of personal knowledge, proximity, family ties, professional relations, and everyday interaction. Anthropological and sociological research has long shown that personalised relations may perform important functions of mediation, cooperation, and access to resources, while also becoming intertwined with patron–client relations, recommendations, brokerage, and other forms of informal political exchange (Wolf, 1966; Boissevain, 1966; Silverman, 1965; Piselli, 1989; Zinn, 2001; Minicuci, 2012). These practices cannot simply be reduced to cultural residues opposed to modern institutions. They often emerge precisely at the intersection between formal rules and practical access to resources and services. At the same time, they may enter into tension with principles of impartiality, equality, and procedural transparency when access to public goods or political mediation becomes dependent upon personal relations rather than generalised rules.

Recent Italian anthropological work has further emphasised the importance of analysing these intersections without reducing them to supposedly fixed cultural traits or to a generic “southern mentality”. Rather than treating informal relations as self-explanatory manifestations of local culture, this literature directs attention to the situated overlap between social networks, institutions, access to resources, and the everyday negotiation of formal and informal norms (Copertino, 2026). In the Sorrento case, this distinction is especially important. The issue is not whether interpersonal trust is intrinsically problematic, nor whether political scandal simply reveals the absence of trust. Rather, the crisis brought into public view the potentially conflicting logics through which political trust may operate: on the one hand, trust grounded in personal proximity, reciprocity, reputation, and direct knowledge; on the other, trust grounded in expectations of institutional impartiality, transparency, and publicly accountable procedures.

The anthropological significance of the case lies precisely in this tension. The literature on political crises, corruption, and institutional trust has frequently examined the consequences of scandal in terms of public support, electoral participation, or the transformation of political elites (Thompson, 2000). Less attention has been devoted to the cultural and emotional processes through which communities interpret moral ruptures, redefine the boundaries of legitimate political conduct, and publicly renegotiate the conditions under which political trust becomes possible. Political scandals are not merely institutional events. They are also moments of intense symbolic production during which public respectability, collective belonging, and the legitimacy of political relationships become objects of explicit contestation.

From this perspective, the case of Sorrento offers an opportunity to examine the relationship between civic trauma and democratic re-legitimation. Following Alexander’s (2004) influential formulation, trauma does not simply coincide with the event that triggers it but with the social process through which a collectivity attributes meaning to a wound perceived as threatening its identity. Trauma is therefore neither immediate nor automatic. It must be narrated, debated, interpreted, and rendered publicly intelligible. What matters analytically is not the event alone, but the collective process through which it comes to be understood as a rupture in the moral and symbolic continuity of the community.

A similar perspective emerges in the work of Das (2007), who has shown that traumatic events do not end with their public manifestation but continue to sediment within everyday life, ordinary conversations, and the practices through which individuals seek to reintegrate exceptional events into a newly established normality. In Sorrento, the meaning of the scandal was likewise shaped not only within judicial and institutional arenas but through its continuous negotiation in everyday life.

In the case analysed here, the mayor’s arrest marked the triggering event of a crisis that unfolded over a period of more than a year. Following the appointment of an Extraordinary Commissioner to administer the municipality,1 the town gradually processed its experience through a wide range of discursive practices: newspaper articles, social media comments, memes, political cartoons, public debates, political meetings, informal conversations, and ultimately the electoral campaign preceding the 2026 municipal elections. Taken together, these materials make it possible to observe not only the initial rupture but also the processes through which residents interpreted what had occurred, contested its meaning, and debated the conditions under which political legitimacy might be reconstructed.

Particularly significant in this context is the local category of scuorno. In Neapolitan and local usage, the term conveys a relational form of shame associated with public exposure, loss of face, and the perception of being judged by others. Its recurrence in everyday speech and social commentary after the scandal is analytically significant because it reveals how residents translated an institutional crisis into a locally intelligible moral language of reputational injury and collective implication. As discussed below, this collective dimension concerns the social circulation of shame rather than any assumption of collective responsibility.

The aim of this article is to analyse how this perceived civic wound was publicly worked through and how the subsequent political process contributed to a renegotiation of the grounds of legitimate political trust. More specifically, it asks how a local community reworks a crisis of political legitimacy and which symbolic, discursive, and participatory mechanisms contribute to the reconstruction of civic order.

The argument advanced here is that the 2026 electoral campaign fulfilled a function extending beyond ordinary political competition. Rather than serving merely as a procedure for selecting a new municipal administration, it created a public arena in which political legitimacy could be debated and partially reconstituted. Public meetings, candidate debates, political programmes, digital discussion, and other forms of civic participation made political claims increasingly visible, comparable, and contestable. The significance of this process lies not in a simple restoration of a pre-existing condition of trust, but in the attempt to redefine the terms under which trust in political representatives and institutions could once again be considered legitimate.

From this perspective, the Sorrento case contributes to a broader debate on the relationship between political scandal, public emotions, institutional trust, and democratic legitimacy. At a time characterised by widespread distrust of institutions and profound transformations in political participation, the central question is not simply how trust is “rebuilt” after a crisis. It is how different forms of trust are distinguished, contested, and reconfigured when the legitimacy of political relationships comes under public scrutiny. More than a local story, the experience of Sorrento constitutes an ethnographic case through which to observe how a community confronts a moral wound and attempts, through public and democratic practices, to renegotiate the conditions of legitimate political representation.

The discussion that follows unfolds in three stages. First, the crisis is analysed as a form of civic and moral trauma in which reputational injury and institutional distrust became closely intertwined. Second, the article examines the discursive practices through which the community publicly worked through this rupture and debated the meaning of political relationships. Finally, it shows how the 2026 electoral campaign and municipal elections functioned not merely as a political contest but as a process of democratic re-legitimation through which the grounds of legitimate political trust were publicly renegotiated.

2. Civic Trauma and Political Legitimacy

Political crises do not produce institutional consequences alone. When they involve figures invested with a strong representative role, their effects may extend beyond the administrative sphere and enter the symbolic life of the community. In such cases, what is destabilised is not only confidence in a particular administration or political leadership, but also the relationship between institutional representation and the image through which a community recognises and presents itself. It is from this perspective that the events unfolding in Sorrento following the arrest of the incumbent mayor in May 2025 can be understood.2

Anthropological and sociological scholarship has shown that collective trauma is not confined to wars, natural disasters, or mass violence. As Alexander (2004) argues, cultural trauma arises when members of a collectivity come to understand an event as a serious wound to their shared identity. Trauma, in this perspective, does not reside automatically in the event itself. It emerges through the social processes by which an occurrence is narrated, interpreted, circulated, and recognised as having consequences for the collectivity.

In Sorrento, the mayor’s arrest was rapidly interpreted in terms that exceeded the judicial affair itself. Observation of the local press, social media discussions, and public and private conversations during the weeks that followed revealed an emotional register that could not be reduced to political disappointment or indignation. One word recurred with particular frequency: scuorno.

The prominence of this emic category constitutes one of the most significant features of the episode. Scuorno, in Neapolitan and local usage, cannot be translated straightforwardly as “shame”. The term encompasses embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, loss of face, and moral discomfort, but its particular analytical relevance lies in its relational and public dimension. It refers to an experience in which a person or group perceives itself as exposed to the judgement of others and as suffering a consequent loss of reputation. Unlike guilt, which presupposes responsibility for an action, scuorno may also be experienced by those who have committed no transgression themselves but who nevertheless feel implicated through relations of belonging.

This distinction helps explain why the term acquired such prominence in Sorrento. The ethnographic material does not indicate collective responsibility for the alleged practices under judicial investigation, nor does it justify inferring that the community as a whole participated in or benefited from them. What it documents is a different process: many residents interpreted the public exposure of the affair as a reputational injury affecting the town itself. Scuorno thus provided a local moral vocabulary through which an institutional crisis could be experienced and communicated as a form of collective exposure.

This dynamic enters into dialogue with the long Mediterranean anthropological discussion of honour, shame, and public reputation. The work of Pitt-Rivers (1965), Peristiany (1965), and Herzfeld (1985) drew attention to the relational character of reputation and to the importance of the gaze of others in the constitution of social standing. These approaches should not be read as defining a homogeneous “Mediterranean culture”, but they remain useful for understanding situations in which moral evaluation is publicly distributed across networks of belonging rather than confined to individual interiority.

Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy is particularly relevant in this respect. Cultural intimacy refers to those aspects of collective identity that may produce embarrassment before outsiders while simultaneously remaining recognisable as intimately one’s own (Herzfeld, 1997). The Sorrento case, however, requires a cautious application of this concept. The scandal did not simply reveal a hidden cultural reality shared by the population. What changed was the scale and direction of exposure: an event initially centred on municipal government became the object of intense public circulation, and residents repeatedly interpreted that circulation through concern for how Sorrento itself was being seen and represented.

This distinction becomes especially evident when considering media circulation. In the days following the arrest, the affair moved beyond local political discussion and entered broader news and digital circuits. For a town whose public representation is strongly associated with scenic beauty, international tourism, hospitality, and cultural prestige, the juxtaposition between these established representations and the language of political scandal was experienced by many residents as particularly dissonant. The reputational rupture was therefore not equivalent to the institutional crisis, but the two became closely entangled in public discourse.

Rather than multiplying explanatory frameworks, it is useful here to retain a more limited symbolic insight from the anthropology of classification and political representation. Douglas (1966) showed how disruptions become especially powerful when they disturb established symbolic boundaries, while Balandier (1980) emphasised the role of representation, performance, and imagery in the production of political legitimacy. In Sorrento, the crisis unsettled both domains: it disturbed a well-established public representation of the town and simultaneously called into question the credibility of those entrusted with representing it institutionally.

It is within this context that the visual productions emerging spontaneously in the days following the mayor’s arrest become particularly revealing. Among these, the most striking was the meme depicting the statue of Saint Antonino3 with his face buried in his hands. I have analysed this episode in greater detail elsewhere, in a study devoted to the circulation of the “Pensive Christ” meme and to local expressions of collective scuorno (Gugg, 2025). There I argued that the rapid diffusion of the image could not be understood merely as an instance of digital humour, but as a means of rendering a diffuse moral experience publicly recognisable.

At first glance, the image might appear to be no more than an ironic manipulation typical of contemporary digital culture. Its circulation, however, depended upon something more than humour. The gesture of covering the face condensed an emotional condition that many residents immediately recognised. The meme transformed a difficult-to-articulate sense of public embarrassment into a concise and shareable visual form.

Its anthropological significance lies precisely in this capacity for condensation. The patron saint, ordinarily associated with protection, civic continuity, and collective identification, is represented as sharing the community’s embarrassment. He does not function here as an external moral judge. Rather, his gesture makes scuorno visible by placing an emblematic figure of the town itself within the same field of exposure as its inhabitants.

The symbolic efficacy of the image becomes clearer when one considers Saint Antonino’s position within the local imaginary. He is not only Sorrento’s patron saint but also one of the figures through which the town narrates its historical continuity. His presence permeates urban memory, religious festivals, place names, devotional practices, and public representations of local belonging. Altering his image therefore means intervening in a symbolic vocabulary through which the community commonly speaks about itself.

From this perspective, the meme may be understood as one element of collective trauma work. Following Shifman (2013), memes can be approached not merely as digital entertainment but as forms of cultural production capable of condensing narratives, emotions, and positions into readily circulating visual objects. In the Sorrento case, the Saint Antonino meme translated scuorno into a public image and, through its circulation, made the experience itself available for recognition, repetition, irony, and discussion.

The material examined here therefore points to a crisis operating simultaneously on several levels. It concerned the credibility of municipal institutions, the external reputation of the town, and the symbolic relationship through which residents identified with Sorrento as a moral community. Scuorno became one of the principal idioms through which this overlap was expressed; visual satire rendered it publicly visible; and the broader circulation of commentary transformed the scandal into an object of collective interpretation.

The analytical question that follows is therefore not simply how trust, once lost, can be restored. It is how a crisis experienced as both institutional rupture and reputational injury becomes the object of public working-through, and how the legitimacy of political relationships is subsequently debated and reformulated. The following sections examine this process through the discursive, digital, and participatory practices that developed during the months preceding the 2026 municipal elections, culminating in an electoral arena in which competing claims to political legitimacy could once again be made publicly visible and contestable.

3. Materials and Methods

This study is based on ethnographic research conducted in Sorrento from the arrest of the incumbent mayor in May 2025 through the 2026 municipal election campaign, following a period in which the municipality was administered by an Extraordinary Commissioner. The aim of the research was not to analyse electoral behaviour in quantitative terms or to measure voting preferences, but rather to investigate the processes through which a local community discusses, interprets, and publicly works through a crisis of political legitimacy.

The study lies at the intersection of political anthropology, media anthropology, and research on the local public sphere (Appadurai, 1996). Rather than focusing primarily on electoral outcomes, it examines the process leading from the initial political crisis to the municipal elections, treating the intervening period—and particularly the electoral campaign—as an arena for the production of public discourse, the construction of collective narratives, and the negotiation of political legitimacy.

Methodologically, the research combines situated ethnographic observation (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Davies, 2008), monitoring of local media, and qualitative analysis of digital interactions. It developed through two phases characterised by different degrees of ethnographic intensity and documentation. The first began with the mayor’s arrest in May 2025 and involved situated observation of public reactions, local conversations, media representations, and the circulation of expressions of collective embarrassment, particularly scuorno. During this phase, the author’s long-standing membership in the community provided an important position from which to observe and interpret the unfolding crisis, although the material was not collected through a uniformly systematic protocol. The second phase, corresponding to approximately two months of the 2026 municipal election campaign, involved intensive and systematic collection of public political discourse, including social media posts and comments, candidates’ statements, local news coverage, electoral documentation, and observation of public meetings and debates. The resulting corpus is therefore particularly substantial for the electoral period, which constitutes the principal empirical focus of the analysis, while the earlier phase provides the historical, moral, and interpretive context in which the campaign unfolded.

During the intensive electoral research phase, the author maintained a chronologically organised research archive comprising fieldnotes, records of public events, candidates’ statements, citizens’ reactions, local controversies, and digital exchanges. This documentation made it possible to reconstruct the development of the campaign and compare interpretations as they emerged. The earlier phase of the crisis was reconstructed through the author’s situated knowledge and available documentary sources, rather than treated as equivalent to the systematically assembled electoral corpus. This distinction is important because the two phases provide different forms and degrees of empirical evidence.

A substantial portion of the empirical material was drawn from the local media ecosystem. During the intensive electoral research phase, online newspapers, blogs, local news websites, and social media pages devoted to political life on the Sorrento Peninsula were monitored regularly, with particularly close attention to developments during the campaign. This methodological choice reflects the observation that contemporary political debate and electoral campaigns no longer develop exclusively through rallies, campaign posters, or public meetings, but unfold across multiple interconnected communicative arenas.

Particular attention was devoted to Facebook, which represented one of the principal digital arenas of local political debate during the period examined, owing both to the systematic presence of political and institutional actors and to extensive citizen participation. Hundreds of posts published by mayoral candidates, candidates for the municipal council, civic lists, local news outlets, and citizens actively engaged in public debate were collected and archived. Users’ comments were also examined, not simply as isolated individual reactions but as components of wider conversational threads through which interpretations, judgements, memories, and competing representations of local political life were articulated.

This methodological approach reflects the growing anthropological interest in digital forms of public participation (Miller & Slater, 2000; Postill & Pink, 2012). Social media constitutes one of the sites in which accusations are formulated, reputations constructed and contested, collective emotions expressed, and interpretations of social reality negotiated. In the Sorrento case, political controversies frequently circulated between social media, local news outlets, everyday conversations, and public meetings, making it methodologically inappropriate to treat digital and face-to-face arenas as separate domains.

Alongside online observation, the research included direct observation of selected public events organised during the electoral campaign. These included presentations of electoral lists, neighbourhood assemblies, thematic meetings, campaign rallies, public debates, and initiatives promoted by local associations. Particular attention was paid to occasions on which candidates interacted directly with citizens, since these encounters made it possible to observe not only policy proposals but also the practices through which political credibility and competing claims to legitimacy were publicly constructed.

A particularly significant component of the research was the public debate involving the three mayoral candidates, held on 16 May 2026 at the Teatro Tasso. This event is methodologically noteworthy because of the researcher’s own position within it. On that occasion, the author did not act solely as an observer but also participated in designing the debate format and selecting questions submitted by citizens.

Participation in organising the debate raises issues of reflexivity and positionality that have been extensively discussed within contemporary anthropology (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Davies, 2008). Ethnographic knowledge is produced through relationships and forms of engagement that shape both observation and interpretation. The researcher’s involvement in this event was therefore explicitly incorporated into the analysis and subjected to reflexive scrutiny rather than treated as external to the conditions under which the ethnographic material was produced.

In this specific case, the author did not participate as a political actor or supporter of any candidate. His role concerned the organisation of a public discussion intended to provide the three candidates with a common framework in which to address questions of public interest. This position provided access not only to the debate itself but also to the preliminary negotiations through which participants defined its format, rules, priorities, and procedures. These interactions constitute part of the ethnographic material analysed in this article and are particularly relevant to the discussion of procedural visibility and democratic re-legitimation developed below.

This dual positioning—simultaneously participating in and analytically observing the social world under study—constitutes one of the defining features of the research. The author is a member of the community and possesses long-standing familiarity with the local context, networks of social relationships, and collective memories that structure public life in Sorrento. Such familiarity was not assumed to provide transparent access to local meanings; rather, it was itself subjected to ethnographic scrutiny, particularly where shared knowledge, political genealogies, reputations, and relationships of proximity might otherwise appear self-evident.

The study therefore adopts a reflexive approach that explicitly acknowledges the author’s positionality as one of the conditions under which ethnographic knowledge was produced. In this respect, the research aligns with traditions of anthropology at home, in which researchers investigate social worlds to which they themselves belong while maintaining analytical attention to the effects of familiarity, involvement, and situated knowledge (Jackson, 1987; Peirano, 1998).

The corpus—including social media posts and comments, newspaper articles, public statements, fieldnotes, observations of public events and debates, and electoral documentation—was analysed qualitatively and iteratively. Materials were organised chronologically and read comparatively across different communicative arenas in order to identify recurrent themes, expressions, metaphors, and shifts in the interpretation of the crisis over time. Particular attention was paid to recurring references to shame and scuorno, public reputation, political continuity and discontinuity, personal and political relationships, institutional credibility, and claims concerning the renewal of local political life. The analysis did not seek to establish the statistical prevalence of these themes within the population. Rather, it examined how particular interpretations emerged, circulated across different settings, were contested or reformulated, and acquired public significance during the period under study.

The selection of examples presented in the article was purposive rather than statistically representative. Episodes were chosen for their relevance to the research questions, their capacity to illustrate contrasting interpretations of political legitimacy, and their significance within the documented development of the electoral campaign. Public statements by candidates and other political actors are distinguished from comments by private citizens, whose contributions are generally paraphrased without reproducing identifying details. The analysis treats these exchanges as situated public discourse rather than as evidence of the distribution of opinions across the population.

From this perspective, the electoral campaign is understood not merely as a competition for governing the town but as a public arena in which residents and political actors debated the town’s future, its recent political past, and the criteria by which political credibility and legitimacy could be publicly claimed. This approach makes it possible to analyse voting and electoral competition as components of a broader process of democratic re-legitimation, without assuming that the elections themselves resolved the institutional and moral tensions generated by the crisis.

4. Results

4.1. Public Elaboration of Civic Trauma: From Shame to Participation

The public working through of the crisis did not unfold solely through the institutional procedures prescribed by law. It also took shape through an intense process of discursive production involving citizens, civic associations, local media, and digital platforms (Gugg, 2025). Analysis of the material collected shows that public discussion frequently moved beyond the mayor’s arrest itself and focused on the wider reputational consequences of the affair. Residents repeatedly expressed concern that Sorrento as a whole had become associated with images of corruption, clientelism, and administrative opacity. The reactions documented in the research material reveal a recurring concern with the public image of the town and the possibility that the misconduct attributed to individual political actors might be projected onto the community as a whole. This concern was expressed through references to collective embarrassment, damaged reputation, and the fear of being judged by outsiders, particularly in a locality whose economy and civic self-representation are closely tied to international tourism.

The significance of these reactions lies not in any presumed acceptance of collective responsibility, but in the perception of reputational injury extending beyond the individuals directly involved in the investigation. The ethnographic material does not establish that residents identified with the alleged practices at the centre of the scandal. It instead suggests that the public association between Sorrento and the affair became a matter of concern in its own right. Civic shame, in this sense, concerned the town’s exposure to external judgement rather than a shared admission of culpability.

The appointment of an Extraordinary Commissioner intensified the sense that the town had entered an exceptional political phase. On the one hand, the commissioner ensured the formal continuity of municipal administration. On the other, the suspension of elected municipal government made the interruption of ordinary democratic representation particularly visible. For almost a year, administrative continuity coexisted with the absence of an elected mayor, executive, and municipal council.

This interval did not produce a simple political vacuum. On the contrary, public discussion about the town’s political future intensified. Local Facebook groups became sites of sustained debate; civic associations called for public debates among the mayoral candidates; and local newspapers published contributions by professionals, former officeholders, and citizens. Particularly significant was the joint statement issued by the three mayoral candidates proposing a public debate based on questions submitted by citizens and committing themselves to avoiding fake news, fake accounts, and personal attacks. Beyond its immediate organisational purpose, the initiative made the rules of political competition themselves an object of public declaration.

The period preceding the election was therefore marked by a growing concern not only with who would govern Sorrento next but also with the criteria through which future political claims would be judged. Calls for transparency, public confrontation, accessibility, and clearer procedural rules appeared repeatedly across the material. The crisis had made the conduct of political competition itself part of the debate.

One notable feature of the material collected during these months is that public discussion focused less on reconstructing individual criminal responsibility—which remained a matter for the courts—than on questions of political responsibility, silence, proximity, networks of influence, and the relationship between economic interests and public decision-making. Comments and public interventions frequently raised questions about how local political arrangements had developed, how decisions had been made, who had maintained political relationships with whom, and why certain practices or patterns of governance had remained insufficiently scrutinised.

At the same time, debate increasingly moved toward substantive issues concerning the future of the town: the relationship between tourism development and residents’ quality of life, pressure on the housing market, the continuing decline of the resident population, the future of the harbour, the Municipal Urban Plan, the management of public assets, and the functioning of the local administration. The scandal thus became connected to a broader discussion concerning the model of urban governance itself.

A recurrent question running through many interventions was therefore not simply “Who was responsible?” but “How was it possible for things to reach this point?” This distinction is analytically important. The public debate was concerned not only with assigning blame but also with constructing explanations. Residents and political actors sought to connect the immediate crisis to longer-term questions concerning political relationships, institutional practices, and the organisation of local power.

The interpretations that emerged were far from homogeneous. Some framed the events primarily as the failure of a specific municipal administration. Others interpreted them as evidence of more deeply rooted patterns of relationships, accommodations, and dependencies. Still others explicitly resisted any extension of responsibility from the individuals under investigation to the town as a whole. What emerged, therefore, was not a single collective narrative but a contested field of interpretation in which the meaning and scale of the crisis remained under negotiation.

A particularly revealing controversy emerged on 23 April 2026, following mayoral candidate Ferdinando Pinto’s announcement that, if elected, he intended to appoint two former magistrates to his municipal executive, including one with responsibility for legality. The proposal was presented as a means of restoring institutional credibility after the judicial scandal. The public responses documented in the local press and its associated online discussion, however, revealed competing understandings of what legitimate political authority should entail. One commenter welcomed the initiative as a way of restoring the town’s dignity through individuals of recognised moral standing and professional competence. Another, while expressing personal esteem for Pinto, objected to the appointment of two magistrates and defended the “primacy of politics” (primato della politica), questioning whether such an arrangement would differ sufficiently from continued administration by an extraordinary commissioner. A third commenter summarised a different concern in the words: “All technicians… with no ties to the territory” (Tutti tecnici… senza legami col territorio). These reactions did not simply express support for or opposition to a candidate. They exposed a tension between competing criteria of political legitimacy: professional expertise and institutional independence, on the one hand, and political autonomy and local embeddedness, on the other. The controversy is significant precisely because the same proposal could be interpreted either as a safeguard against opaque political relationships or as a potential weakening of locally grounded democratic representation.4

During the first phase following the arrest, scuorno was frequently expressed through disorientation, bitterness, embarrassment, and attempts to distance the town from the scandal. Over the following months, however, the same moral vocabulary increasingly coexisted with demands for clarification, accountability, vigilance, and public participation. Shame did not disappear, nor can it be assumed to have been collectively transformed in a uniform manner. Yet the material documents a gradual expansion of public discussion from expressions of reputational injury toward explicit demands concerning how local politics should be conducted.

Facebook played a particularly important role in this process. It functioned as a fragmented, conflictual, and highly visible arena in which comments, memories, accusations, irony, memes, charts, public appeals, political statements, and demands for debate accumulated over time. Its significance lay not only in amplifying discussion but also in preserving and reactivating local political memory. Photographs, earlier public statements, previous candidacies, alliances, endorsements, and records of public appearances could be retrieved and recirculated in the course of new controversies.

In a relatively small community, where political biographies and relationships are often widely known, this archival function assumed particular importance. Public discussion increasingly involved the reconstruction of political genealogies: who had previously supported whom, who had belonged to earlier electoral lists, who had participated in previous administrations, who had remained silent during the crisis, and who could credibly claim political discontinuity. Social media thus provided a means through which contemporary political claims were repeatedly tested against publicly retrievable traces of past affiliations and conduct.

An illustrative episode occurred on 7 May 2026, when a political controversy developed around the circulation of an earlier video featuring mayoral candidate Corrado Fattorusso. Having recently served as a municipal executive member in neighbouring Sant’Agnello, Fattorusso was criticised by the political group Sant’Agnello prima di tutto, which recirculated footage in which he had expressed his attachment to that town. The video was used to question the coherence of his subsequent decision to stand for mayor in Sorrento. The associated Facebook discussion, preserved in the research archive, illustrates how political memory could become an instrument of competing claims rather than a shared account of the past. One commenter questioned the political usefulness of the former Sant’Agnello mayor’s support for Fattorusso’s opponent, recalling the outcome of his earlier endorsement of Massimo Coppola. Another defended Fattorusso’s Sorrentine origins and interpreted his candidacy as a response to the disgrace experienced by his hometown, while accusing his critics of having previously supported the administration associated with the scandal. A further participant similarly recalled the former mayor’s support for Coppola in the preceding municipal election. The controversy thus involved not only Fattorusso’s political trajectory but also the biographies and alliances of those questioning his credibility. Earlier endorsements were retrieved and reinterpreted in the present, producing a reciprocal scrutiny in which the political past became a resource for both accusation and defence. Rather than demonstrating that previous affiliations necessarily indicated wrongdoing, the episode shows how competing actors sought to establish which forms of political continuity were legitimate, compromising, or compatible with claims to renewal.

This form of participation did not correspond neatly to traditional party activism. Formal party membership was only weakly visible in the local political arena, while civic lists, individual candidacies, personal reputations, and relational networks occupied a more prominent place. Citizens participating in digital discussion did not simply receive political messages but compared them with their own memories and with materials recirculated by others. Local politics consequently became, in part, a field of biographical and relational verification.

The importance of personal and political relationships became especially visible in debates concerning continuity and discontinuity. Candidates were evaluated not only through their programmes but through their biographies, prior alliances, family and professional relationships, previous electoral participation, and proximity to earlier political configurations. These relations were not automatically interpreted as evidence of clientelism or wrongdoing. Their significance lay in the fact that, after the crisis, proximity itself became increasingly subject to public scrutiny. Relationships that in ordinary political life might have remained taken for granted became objects of explicit interpretation.

Here, the crisis altered the conditions of local political visibility. The issue was no longer simply whether a candidate was personally known or socially embedded in the town—features that remain ordinary and often valued dimensions of municipal politics—but how those relationships were to be interpreted in light of expectations concerning autonomy, transparency, and institutional responsibility. The ethnographic material therefore shows a growing public concern with the boundary between legitimate political proximity and relationships perceived as excessively opaque or dependent.

The gradual redefinition of political priorities reinforced this development. Problems that had long existed in local debate—tourism pressure, housing, demographic decline, public assets, administrative functioning, urban planning, and transparency—were increasingly connected to a wider question concerning the relationship between the town as lived by residents and the town as governed. Calls for political and administrative change were consequently not limited to replacing officeholders. They also concerned decision-making procedures, the accessibility of political actors, the visibility of governing practices, and the relationship between economic development and the quality of local democratic life.

During this phase, demands for participation acquired a specifically procedural dimension. Calls for public meetings, debates among candidates, accessible programmes, thematic discussions, and common rules were not merely requests for additional information. They expressed an expectation that political actors should make themselves publicly available for comparison, questioning, and scrutiny. Political visibility therefore came to mean more than electoral communication: it became one of the criteria through which claims to legitimacy could be evaluated.

This helps explain the significance of the transition into the formal electoral campaign. When candidacies began to take shape in March 2026, candidates were immediately confronted with questions concerning their relationship to the preceding political cycle, their interpretation of the crisis, their claims to discontinuity, and the credibility of their proposals for future government. The campaign therefore developed within a moral and political landscape already shaped by months of public discussion.

The movement described here should not be understood as a simple progression from shame to trust, nor as evidence that the crisis produced a homogeneous civic mobilisation. Participation remained uneven, contentious, and politically differentiated. What changed was the public arena in which political legitimacy was evaluated: scuorno continued to mark the reputational dimension of the crisis, while intensified scrutiny of political biographies, relationships, and procedures made the conditions of legitimate representation increasingly explicit. The 2026 elections consequently represented neither the resolution of civic trauma nor the restoration of trust, but the first formal institutional moment in a longer process through which competing claims to political legitimacy could be made publicly visible and judged.

The interpretation of the electoral campaign as an opportunity for civic reconstruction was not universally shared. Following the second-round vote of 7–8 June 2026, a communications professional who had worked for the unsuccessful mayoral candidate Ferdinando Pinto published a sharply critical assessment of the campaign. He described it as “the ugliest electoral campaign I have ever experienced here” (la campagna elettorale più brutta che abbia mai vissuto qui) and portrayed Sorrento as “a town split in two, distrustful, angry” (una città spaccata a metà, diffidente, rabbiosa). In his account, electoral competition had often widened rather than repaired the fractures left by the previous year’s institutional crisis. The statement is particularly revealing because the author explicitly acknowledged his involvement in the defeated campaign. His interpretation therefore offers an actor’s situated account of political conflict, rather than an independent assessment of the town as a whole. It also contrasts with other materials in the research archive documenting civil public debates, calls for moderation, and recognition of shared procedural rules despite political disagreement. The contrast should not be resolved by treating either account as representative of the entire community. Rather, it demonstrates that the meaning of the campaign itself remained contested after the election. For some participants, public confrontation provided an opportunity to reassert democratic agency; for others, it exposed unresolved antagonisms and deepened distrust. The restoration of elected municipal government could therefore coexist with sharply divergent assessments of the quality and consequences of the electoral process.

4.2. Elections as Rituals of Democratic Re-Legitimation

If the period between the mayor’s arrest and the beginning of the electoral campaign can be understood as a phase in the public working through of civic trauma, the 2026 municipal elections marked the point at which this process acquired a more explicitly institutional and performative form. Voting did not merely select a new municipal administration. It also provided a publicly recognised procedure through which competing claims to political legitimacy could be articulated, compared, and subjected to collective judgement.

Anthropological scholarship has long shown that political processes cannot be reduced to their administrative or decision-making dimensions. Balandier emphasised the role of representations, ceremonies, and public performances in making political authority visible (Balandier, 1980), while Abélès showed how contemporary politics is also constituted through symbols, rituals, and forms of public presence (Abélès, 1990). From this perspective, elections may be approached as ritualised political events in which a community publicly stages disagreement, representation, and the transfer or renewal of authority.

In Sorrento, this dimension was particularly evident because the elections followed an exceptional crisis of political legitimacy. They took place after the arrest of the sitting mayor, almost a year of administration by an Extraordinary Commissioner, and an extended period of public debate concerning the credibility of local political actors and institutions. The electoral contest was therefore invested with a significance exceeding ordinary political alternation. At stake was not simply who would govern next, but under what publicly recognisable conditions a new municipal administration could claim democratic legitimacy.

Turner’s work on ritual and social drama provides a useful, if limited, framework for understanding this process (Turner, 1969, 1974). Ritualised procedures do not eliminate conflict; rather, they can provide socially recognised forms through which conflict is expressed, organised, and made publicly intelligible. The Sorrento elections may be read in this sense. The crisis of the preceding year was translated into a formal arena of political competition in which candidates, political groups, associations, and citizens confronted one another within a shared institutional framework.

This strategic and relational dimension also recalls the perspective of political anthropology developed by Bailey (1969), for whom political competition involves the positioning of actors, groups, networks, and leaders within a field of recognised rules and resources. In Sorrento, however, these ordinary dynamics of local competition unfolded under intensified public scrutiny. Political biographies, previous alliances, claims of continuity or discontinuity, and relationships with earlier administrations became central elements through which candidates’ credibility was evaluated.

A particularly significant moment was the public debate among the three mayoral candidates.5 Throughout the campaign, civic associations and local organisations had called for an open discussion among the candidates on the principal issues facing the town. The three candidates—Corrado Fattorusso, Ferdinando Pinto, and Raffaele Attardi—subsequently issued a joint statement proposing a single public debate structured around questions submitted by residents.

The importance of this document lay not only in its organisational content but in the explicit formulation of procedural rules. The candidates stated that the debate should be “fair, transparent, and balanced” and committed themselves to a “climate of respectful dialogue”, while rejecting fake news, fake accounts, and personal attacks. Such language is conventional in electoral contexts, but in Sorrento it acquired additional significance because the conduct of political competition had itself become part of the public discussion following the crisis. The agreement therefore made visible a shared commitment to procedural standards before substantive disagreement was staged.

The organisation of the debate at the Teatro Tasso made this procedural dimension especially visible. Questions were collected through an open submission process accessible to residents, selected according to predefined criteria, and organised into shared thematic areas. Equal speaking times, alternating responses, and opportunities for rebuttal further structured the encounter. These arrangements were not merely technical. They transformed procedure itself into an observable component of the political event.

The fact that the questions were submitted by citizens was particularly significant. Candidates did not fully control the agenda but were required to respond within a framework partly shaped by public submissions. This did not amount to direct popular control over the political process, but it altered the usual asymmetry between candidates and audiences by giving residents a formal role in defining the issues to be addressed.

The resulting encounter made candidates’ arguments, political styles, and responsiveness directly comparable, while allowing citizens to assess their performances within a shared procedural framework.

The moderator and the committee responsible for selecting the questions were similarly tasked with maintaining the agreed format and ensuring equal conditions of comparison. The venue itself contributed to the public character of the debate. The Teatro Tasso is one of Sorrento’s principal civic and cultural venues, associated with public events and collective representation. Holding the debate there placed electoral confrontation within a recognisable civic setting and distinguished it from the more fragmented and rapidly shifting exchanges characteristic of social media.

Public reactions to the debate provide a more differentiated view of its significance. In a Facebook discussion accompanying a report published on 16 May 2026, one participant praised the organisers for the quality of the event, while other commenters offered sharply divergent assessments of the candidates’ performances. Some considered Fattorusso the most convincing, others expressed a clear preference for Pinto, and another participant judged Fattorusso and Attardi more concrete in their answers. Not all responses were favourable: one commenter complained that none of the candidates had answered a question that, in his view, required only a yes-or-no response. Other exchanges concerned the availability of a recording, with a participant sharing a link through which the debate could be watched online. These reactions illustrate an important distinction between the public recognition of a common forum for political confrontation and agreement about the substance or quality of the competing political claims. The event did not produce a shared political judgement, nor did its orderly organisation demonstrate that trust had been restored. Its significance lay instead in making disagreement publicly observable within a common procedural setting, while enabling citizens to evaluate both the candidates’ arguments and the adequacy of the answers they received.

Digital platforms nevertheless remained integral to the campaign. Their role changed in relation to the earlier phase of the crisis. During the period of extraordinary administration, Facebook had operated largely as a space for commentary, memory, accusation, irony, and the circulation of interpretations concerning the scandal. During the electoral campaign, it increasingly became integrated into campaign activity itself.

Candidates used social media to announce meetings, present programmes, respond to criticism, and mobilise supporters. Citizens used them to comment on statements, challenge claims, retrieve earlier material, compare positions, and circulate excerpts from public events. Online and offline political life therefore remained closely intertwined.

The Sorrento case illustrates how contemporary local political legitimacy is produced across interconnected arenas rather than within a single public sphere. Neighbourhood meetings, electoral events, the Teatro Tasso debate, local news coverage, and social media discussions continually fed into one another. Public performances acquired digital afterlives, while online controversies were repeatedly carried into face-to-face encounters.

Goffman’s analysis of social performance is useful here insofar as electoral campaigns require candidates to present themselves before an audience, establish credibility, and manage the relationship between biography, public role, and political claim (Goffman, 1959). In Sorrento, this performative dimension was intensified by the crisis because candidates’ self-presentations were repeatedly tested against publicly circulating memories of previous affiliations, conduct, and political relationships.

The performative dimension, however, should not be extended to the point of treating the entire community as a unified actor staging its own recovery. What the ethnographic material shows is more specific: different actors publicly enacted different roles within the electoral process. Candidates presented themselves as credible representatives; associations claimed a mediating and civic role; citizens exercised scrutiny, criticism, support, or refusal; media and digital platforms amplified and recontextualised these performances. Democratic re-legitimation emerged, if at all, from the interaction among these positions rather than from a single collective will.

This perspective helps explain why apparently secondary features of the campaign acquired particular importance. Transparency, respectful conduct, the rules governing public debate, equal speaking time, access to questions, and the tone of political communication became more than stylistic matters. They functioned as observable indicators of how political actors related to the procedural expectations associated with democratic competition.

The electoral results provide an important institutional context for interpreting this process. In the first round, held on 24–25 May 2026, Corrado Fattorusso received 4344 votes (49.10%), Ferdinando Pinto 3849 (43.50%), and Raffaele Attardi 655 (7.40%). As no candidate obtained an absolute majority, Fattorusso and Pinto proceeded to a run-off on 7–8 June. Fattorusso was elected mayor with 4723 votes (59.41%), against Pinto’s 3227 (40.59%). Voter turnout declined from 58.40% in the first round to 52.12% in the run-off. These figures establish the outcome of the institutional transition but should not be interpreted as a direct measure of restored political trust. In particular, the decline in turnout cautions against treating the election as evidence of an undifferentiated civic mobilisation. The electoral process re-established elected municipal authority while leaving open the question of how broadly citizens recognised the credibility of the new political leadership.6

The 2026 municipal elections can therefore be interpreted as a ritual of democratic re-legitimation, provided that ritual is not equated with reconciliation or successful social repair. Following almost a year of extraordinary administration, the electoral process restored the ordinary institutional mechanism through which municipal authority could be authorised and contested. Its significance lay not only in producing a winner but also in re-establishing a publicly recognised framework for political representation, disagreement, and accountability.

This procedural restoration did not resolve the judicial crisis, erase memories of political complicity, or demonstrate that citizens had regained trust in their representatives. As the contrasting reactions documented during and after the campaign suggest, participants could recognise the legitimacy of electoral procedures while remaining deeply divided over political credibility and the meaning of the recent past. Democratic re-legitimation should therefore be understood as the provisional restoration of conditions under which political authority could once again be publicly claimed, scrutinised, and challenged, rather than as evidence of a completed process of civic reconciliation.

5. Discussion

The Sorrento case provides an opportunity to reconsider a broader question concerning political scandal and democratic legitimacy: what happens when a crisis calls into question not only particular officeholders but also the grounds on which political relationships are considered trustworthy and legitimate? Studies of political scandal have often emphasised declining public support, electoral disengagement, and the erosion of institutional trust. The ethnographic material examined here suggests a more complex process. A scandal may certainly produce distrust and delegitimation, but it may also expose previously taken-for-granted political relationships to intensified public scrutiny and create conditions in which the criteria of legitimate political conduct become objects of explicit debate.

This analysis requires a distinction between different forms of trust. Trust should not be treated as an intrinsically democratic good or as a single resource that is simply lost during a scandal and subsequently restored. Interpersonal trust develops through familiarity, repeated interaction, reputation, reciprocity, and direct knowledge of others. Political and institutional trust, by contrast, concerns expectations regarding the conduct and trustworthiness of political actors and institutions (Luhmann, 1979; Levi & Stoker, 2000). In democratic institutions, these expectations are also connected to the belief that public authority will be exercised according to sufficiently predictable, accountable, and impartial procedures (Rothstein & Stolle, 2008; Rothstein & Teorell, 2008).

This distinction is particularly important in local political contexts characterised by dense networks of proximity. Anthropological studies of patron–client relations have long demonstrated that formal institutions coexist with personalised relations of mediation, reciprocity, dependence, and access to resources (Wolf, 1966; Boissevain, 1966; Silverman, 1965). Such relations should not automatically be identified with corruption. They may facilitate cooperation, political mediation, or access to institutions and resources. Yet they may also come into tension with the impersonal and universalistic expectations associated with public office when access, influence, or decision-making becomes dependent upon particular relationships rather than generally applicable procedures.

Italian scholarship has examined this ambiguity in considerable detail. Piselli (1989) analyses clientelism as a relational system organised around exchange, protection, mediation, and asymmetrical dependence, while Zinn’s (2001) study of raccomandazione shows how personalised forms of intercession may become normalised in everyday social life even when they conflict with principles such as merit, equality, or institutional impartiality. Minicuci’s (2012) ethnography similarly illustrates the ways in which family relations, neighbourhood ties, political mediation, and access to public resources may become intertwined in local political life. These approaches are valuable precisely because they move analysis away from the assumption that informal political relations are simply expressions of a fixed cultural disposition.

This anti-essentialist qualification is especially important in the Italian and southern Italian context. Patronage, informal mediation, and personalised politics cannot be treated as intrinsic properties of “Southern culture” or as self-explanatory survivals of a supposedly deficient modernity. Historical and anthropological research has documented patron–client relations in different Italian regions and institutional settings (Silverman, 1965), while more recent work has emphasised the need to study the concrete intersections between institutions, social networks, access to resources, and practices of mediation rather than reducing them to a generic cultural mentality (Copertino, 2026). The relevant analytical question is therefore not whether Sorrento exemplifies an allegedly typical southern political culture, but how particular forms of political proximity were interpreted, contested, and re-evaluated after the crisis.

The Sorrento material illustrates this tension particularly well. Local political life is deeply relational: candidates and elected officials are encountered in everyday settings, personal and professional biographies are widely known, and political affiliations intersect with family, territorial, occupational, and friendship networks. Such proximity can sustain accessibility, mediation, recognition, and interpersonal trust. The ethnography also shows, however, that after the scandal these same relationships increasingly became objects of public scrutiny. Citizens reconstructed political genealogies, revisited earlier alliances, questioned claims of continuity and discontinuity, and asked how particular political relationships should be interpreted.

The analytical significance of this process lies in the fact that proximity itself became problematic without becoming illegitimate per se. The material does not support the conclusion that interpersonal relations constituted a patronage system, still less that the community as a whole participated in or benefited from corrupt exchanges. What it does show is that the crisis destabilised the taken-for-granted relationship between personal familiarity and political credibility. Relations that might ordinarily signify accessibility, local embeddedness, or mutual knowledge could now also be questioned in terms of autonomy, opacity, dependence, or accountability.

The Sorrento crisis can consequently be interpreted as exposing a tension between two partially overlapping grounds of political trust: one based on personal proximity, reputation, reciprocity, and direct knowledge, and another based on expectations of institutional impartiality, transparency, and publicly accountable procedure. Patronage, where it exists, may itself depend upon highly developed forms of interpersonal trust and reciprocal expectation; the democratic problem arises when personalised relations interfere with, substitute for, or are perceived as overriding the impartial procedures expected of public institutions. These logics are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since local democracy depends upon social relationships as well as formal institutions. The relevant question is therefore how their boundaries are negotiated and under what circumstances particular relationships come to be regarded publicly as legitimate or problematic.

This perspective is consistent with an anthropology of institutions that understands them not as self-contained structures but as relational configurations continually produced through situated practices, discourses, negotiations, and encounters. Institutional authority is exercised by concrete actors embedded in social worlds, while citizens encounter institutions through specific persons, offices, procedures, symbols, and experiences (Abélès, 1990; Gupta, 1995). Recent anthropological work has further emphasised that institutional practices and relations of power must be analysed through the situated interactions in which they are continuously negotiated and reinterpreted (Falconieri & Benadusi, 2026). In the Sorrento case, political legitimacy emerged precisely at this intersection between formal institutional roles and socially embedded political relationships.

The concept of civic trauma is useful precisely at this point. Its analytical value does not lie in assimilating political scandal to war, disaster, or mass violence, but in describing the process through which a political event comes to be publicly interpreted as a wound affecting collective self-representation. Scuorno provided an emic vocabulary through which this reputational dimension became intelligible. The crisis was experienced by some residents as a form of reflected exposure: not because they accepted responsibility for the alleged acts under investigation, but because the name of the community to which they belonged had become publicly associated with them.

This distinction also qualifies the notion of cultural intimacy. The scandal need not be understood as the revelation of a hidden political culture secretly shared by the population. What became visible was instead a contested field of relationships, interpretations, accusations, and memories whose meaning changed once they entered broader public circulation. The ethnographic problem is therefore not to identify a concealed collective truth behind the scandal, but to observe how public exposure alters the interpretation of relationships that had previously been embedded in ordinary local political life.

Digital media played a particularly important role in this transformation. The Sorrento material shows that social platforms did more than circulate opinions about the scandal. They created a retrievable archive of local political biographies and relationships. Previous candidacies, endorsements, photographs, public statements, alliances, and appearances could be recovered and recirculated in response to contemporary claims. Political memory thus acquired a new degree of persistence and public accessibility.

This archival function is significant for the anthropology of contemporary local politics. In a small community, political memory has traditionally circulated through interpersonal knowledge, oral recollection, reputation, and local networks. Digital platforms do not abolish these forms of knowledge; they partially externalise and stabilise them. Claims to political discontinuity can be confronted with photographs of earlier alliances, current statements with archived ones, and newly constructed political identities with retrievable traces of previous affiliations. The result is not necessarily greater factual consensus, since digital media also facilitate selective framing, polemic, and competing interpretations. What changes is the public availability of materials through which political credibility may be contested.

The Sorrento case therefore also complicates the common opposition between distrust and participation. Distrust can certainly lead to cynicism, disengagement, or withdrawal. The material examined here, however, shows that suspicion and disappointment may also generate practices of verification, memory, questioning, and oversight. This does not mean that distrust is inherently democratising. Rather, under particular conditions, it may contribute to a more demanding public evaluation of political claims.

The transition to the electoral campaign made this dynamic increasingly procedural. Requests for public debates, questions submitted by citizens, equal speaking times, common rules, and explicit commitments concerning political conduct made the organisation of political competition itself visible. This procedural visibility is particularly significant in light of the distinction developed above between personalised and institutional forms of trust. The public value of such procedures does not depend upon eliminating personal relationships from politics. It lies in subjecting political competition to rules that apply independently of those relationships and can be observed, compared, and contested by participants.

This distinction also refines the argument concerning elections as rituals of democratic re-legitimation. Elections do not repair political communities in any automatic sense, and ritual should not be understood as synonymous with reconciliation. Their significance lies partly in institutionalising conflict: candidates compete, citizens disagree, interpretations of the past remain contested, yet these conflicts are channelled through procedures whose authority does not depend entirely upon personal relations among the participants.

The 2026 municipal elections therefore marked a return to elected political representation after the period of extraordinary administration, but not a return to a presumed pre-crisis state of trust. Democratic re-legitimation is better understood here as a provisional and contested process through which the grounds of legitimate political authority were made publicly negotiable once again. The election authorised a new municipal government according to recognised democratic rules; it could not determine whether citizens would subsequently consider that government trustworthy.

This distinction between legitimacy and trust is theoretically important. An institution may possess procedural legitimacy without enjoying widespread interpersonal or political trust, just as highly trusted personal relationships may operate outside—or even in tension with—the impersonal principles associated with public institutions. The Sorrento case therefore cautions against treating trust as a single continuum running from breakdown to repair. What followed the scandal was instead a reconfiguration of the criteria through which political trust, legitimacy, and personal relationships were publicly evaluated.

The broader contribution of the case lies in showing how democratic re-legitimation may involve the renegotiation of different logics of political relationship. Local democracy is neither reducible to impersonal bureaucracy nor adequately described as a network of personal ties. It operates at their intersection. Political actors must be socially recognisable and relationally embedded while also being expected to act through procedures that can be publicly defended as impartial, transparent, and accountable. Crises make the tensions between these demands particularly visible.

From this perspective, the movement traced in this article—from scuorno and reputational exposure through public scrutiny and electoral participation to democratic re-legitimation—should not be understood as a completed trajectory of civic healing. It is an open and contingent process. The judicial proceedings remained ongoing at the time of writing, political relationships continued to be contested, and the election itself could provide no guarantee regarding the future quality of government. What the ethnography captures is a particular historical moment in which a community, confronted with a crisis of political legitimacy, made the criteria of legitimate political relationship unusually visible and publicly debatable.

Taken together, these findings do not demonstrate that Sorrento successfully “rebuilt trust”. Rather, they show how political scandal can expose competing regimes of trust and create an arena in which their democratic legitimacy is renegotiated. Civic trauma, public reputation, interpersonal relations, institutional impartiality, digital scrutiny, and electoral procedure are not separate dimensions of this process. They intersect in the practical and symbolic work through which local political authority is made credible, questioned, and provisionally re-legitimated.

6. Conclusions

This article began with a seemingly simple question: what happens to a local community when a major political crisis calls into question the credibility of its institutions? The Sorrento case suggests that the answer cannot be found solely in judicial outcomes, electoral dynamics, or administrative change. The ethnographic material documents a broader process in which political scandal became simultaneously a crisis of institutional legitimacy, a problem of public reputation, and an occasion for questioning the grounds on which political relationships could be considered credible and legitimate.

The arrest of the mayor in May 2025 produced a rupture that many residents experienced not simply as a political event but as a moral and reputational wound. The recurrence of scuorno in public discourse expressed this dimension of the crisis particularly clearly. The term did not imply collective responsibility for the alleged practices under investigation. Rather, it articulated an experience of reflected exposure in which residents with no direct involvement in the judicial case nevertheless perceived the public image of Sorrento as having been damaged by its association with political scandal. In this sense, the crisis acquired the characteristics of civic trauma: a political rupture experienced as injuring the town’s collective image and demanding processes of interpretation and working through.

One of the principal findings of the research concerns the forms this working through took. The crisis did not produce a uniform collective response, nor did it simply lead to political withdrawal. Alongside disorientation, bitterness, and distrust, the period following the scandal was marked by sustained public discussion, digital scrutiny, civic initiatives, and renewed attention to political biographies, relationships, governing practices, and procedural rules. Social media played a particularly important role by turning local political memory into a more durable and accessible resource for scrutiny, while meetings, associations, local media, and electoral events provided interconnected arenas in which competing interpretations of the crisis could circulate.

The analysis also shows why political trust should not be treated as a single resource that is simply lost and subsequently restored. Local political life is embedded in relations of familiarity, proximity, reputation, reciprocity, and personal knowledge that may sustain accessibility and interpersonal trust. Public institutions, however, are also expected to operate according to principles of transparency, accountability, and impartial procedure. The Sorrento crisis made the relationship between these different grounds of trust unusually visible. Political proximity did not become illegitimate in itself, but relationships that had previously been taken for granted became more readily scrutinised in terms of autonomy, dependence, continuity, and institutional responsibility.

This distinction is central to the interpretation of the 2026 electoral campaign. The campaign and municipal elections did not restore a pre-existing condition of trust, nor did they resolve the civic trauma generated by the crisis. Their significance lay instead in providing a formal and publicly visible arena in which competing claims to representation could be compared and judged according to recognised procedures. The public debate among the mayoral candidates, questions submitted by citizens, common rules, equal speaking times, and the return to elected municipal government made procedural legitimacy itself an explicit object of political attention.

Democratic re-legitimation should therefore be understood here as a provisional and contested process rather than as successful repair. The elections re-established elected political representation after the period of extraordinary administration and reopened an institutional arena in which political authority could once again be authorised, criticised, and renewed through democratic procedures. They could not determine whether citizens would subsequently regard the new administration as trustworthy, nor could they settle the meanings of a judicial affair whose proceedings remained ongoing at the time of writing.

The Sorrento case also highlights the importance of public reputation and moral emotion in this process. Scuorno connected an institutional crisis to concerns about how the town was seen by others, while digital media transformed political memory, affiliations, and previous public conduct into resources for contemporary scrutiny. Civic trauma, reputational exposure, interpersonal relationships, institutional expectations, and electoral procedure thus intersected rather than unfolding as separate dimensions of the crisis.

Sorrento should therefore be understood neither as an exceptional case nor as an illustration of a supposedly fixed southern Italian political culture. Its analytical value lies in showing how a small, internationally visible tourist town confronted the overlap between reputational injury and institutional crisis, and how democratic procedures, digital scrutiny, and public debate contributed to the renegotiation of political legitimacy. More broadly, the case suggests that democratic resilience after political scandal may depend less on the restoration of an undifferentiated “trust” than on the capacity to make the terms of political trust publicly visible, contestable, and procedurally accountable.