Old trades: the sciuscià

Sciuscià is a word born, precisely, in relation to this practice, which developed between children and soldiers, with the former being hired by the latter, mainly as shoeshiners.

During the period of the Second World War, when Naples was under Allied rule, the Americans lorded it over the city's streets.
The soldiers, in those days, wandered around the Campanian capital with a domineering manner, demanding and requiring tasks from the young citizens they happened to come across.
The Neapolitan children in question were school-age boys from very poor backgrounds, from the lowest social class, on average between nine and twelve years old, who found themselves drawn in by the men in uniform and ordered to carry out tasks for the purposes desired by these dominant adults, in exchange for a few miserable coins.

The nature of the term

Sciuscià is a word born, precisely, in relation to this practice, which developed between children and soldiers, with the former being hired by the latter, mainly as shoeshiners.
The nature of the expression is most likely linked to this particular profession as such, in a blend of typically American terminology and clumsily Neapolitan pronunciation.
"Shoes shine" (shoe polishing), indeed, would suggest precisely the specific task described above, sought after and carried out, whose pronunciation, mangled by the local children's ungainly lack of knowledge of the foreign language, would have turned it into "sciuscià".
The term in question is presumed to have been spoken by the Allies, as a request, and by the penniless children, as an offer.
The miniature shoeshiners then began to broaden the types of services they offered, expanding this form of begging.
They no longer limited themselves to looking after the shoes of the American soldiers, but bought for them whatever they needed, provided them with what they required, and sold everything that the adults themselves could not sell, ending up crossing the line of legality and slipping into decidedly improper and illicit trafficking, which marked these needy children's entry into the world of crime.

Spread of the word

The word, which by then symbolised not only a job but also a status quo and the emblem of a defined historical era, did not remain confined within the borders of Campania, but spread throughout Italy, with a considerable peak in the capital.
In Rome, indeed, the newspapers often covered the subject and, circulated throughout the peninsula, made the word famous, giving it a generally negative connotation, focusing on its criminal and begging-related aspect.
A son of Lazio, then, Vittorio De Sica, drawing on the customs of the time, made a film about it, whose title is, precisely, "Sciuscià": here, however, the meaning that could be better framed was found in the term "scugnizzo" (street urchin).

Sciuscià in the twenty-first century

Now that a considerable amount of time has passed, none of the original sciuscià have survived to reach our days, but the word is still here, fixed in Neapolitan and Italian memory.
Just as fixed is the tradition, which today's Neapolitans try to uphold and modernise, offering updated and varied shoeshine services, which vary in terms of requests - now accepted only online - or in terms of quality - of shoes to be cared for, often limited only to those made of Italian leather - or in terms of location, now only professional studios and no longer street corners.