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The preceding chapters showed how ideas about morality, space, and place come together to create specific forms of leisure for more or less pious Shi'i Muslim residents of south Beirut. Choices about leisure activities and places are informed by different moral rubrics, as people negotiate social norms, religious tenets, and political loyalties. Pastimes and their settings are assessed according to ideas about where they are located and how their patrons behave—ideas built on assumptions about the relationship between morality and geography in the city. Yet how and where a person hangs out is also an expression of personal taste. This chapter brings taste into the picture and discusses how Dahiya's new leisure sites and practices are valued along with how judgments about class, morality, geography, and politics work together to produce ideas about taste and social hierarchy. It concludes by thinking through the question of whether changing leisure practices and spaces can lead to broader social, political, and urban change.

The evolution of the civil rights movement in Miami after World War II is explored in terms of the struggle for leisure spaces, notably beaches, pools, and golf courses, as the area developed as a tourist capital. In addition, the powerful scope of association between labor, civil rights, and communism resulted in widespread political repression in the Miami area. This chapter highlights how one of the most “liberal” cities in the South reflected an overlooked set of actors and a political dynamic promoting civil rights, and explains how Miami interfaced with larger political processes such as the harassment of civil rights leaders by the Johns Committee of the State legislature during the late 1950s and the disorder surrounding the Republican National Convention in 1968. Miami and Virginia Key Beach were vacation spots often visited by Martin Luther King and other prominent African Americans, and the island remained a powerful gathering place that enhanced the sense of power within the black community.

This chapter explores intimacy and sexuality in courtship. The ordinary experiences of the diaries and memoirs are set against the (somewhat) differing codes of morality dictated by the Catholic Church, the Communist Party (PCI), and mass culture so that we can see how people often measured their choices and experiences against their ideas of how a model man or woman should behave. We see how the rituals, rules, and surveillance common in upper- and middle-class courtships in the 1950s often left little room for intimacy. Meanwhile, the piazza, a common site of courtship in most towns and cities, was all too often about display rather than real communication. By the late 1950s, the economic boom was beginning to open up new spaces of leisure and intimacy for young Italians, particularly the beach and the car. As couples began to spend more time out of the home together, courtship was becoming both more public and more private, with these new spaces providing more space for intimacy and sexuality, with increasingly shared leisure and communication between the sexes.