Girls, boys, art, pleasure! Italy’s paninaro subculture rides again
On a sultry June afternoon the tables of a snack bar in Foglizzo, a small town in northern Italy, fill up with a dozen men riding motorbikes and dressed in colourful apparel. It’s a gang of paninari: a quintessentially Italian, once-dominant youth subculture.
Today, paninari are well into their 50s, and the group we meet in Foglizzo, as the town was celebrating its yearly courgette festival, are no exception. But despite the grey hairs and extra pounds that come with age, they still look smart in their typical paninari outfits, sporting Timberland boots, cowboy style belts and flashy sunglasses.
Their aesthetic, which combines designer clothes with country accessories, and revels in the deliberate ostentation of expensive brands, bloomed in the 1980s and defined the decade. They were rivals with other youth
