In Naples, TikTok is becoming the new showcase for popular food micro-entrepreneurs. Small merchants and artisans of fine food use the platform to tell their stories, sell, and build trust, blending local tradition and digital languages. The " art of making do " is on display, reinterpreted for social media: a way of doing business that, while remaining rooted in Neapolitan identity, is being reinvented through short, viral videos. More than a commercial phenomenon, it's a powerful message for contemporary sociology: the informal economy is finding new forms of expression and legitimacy in the digital world.
From Habitus to Algorithm
The Neapolitan art of making do finds new life: TikTok becomes a symbolic space that renews the aesthetics and dynamics of the informal economy. This phenomenon is historically rooted in the Neapolitan habitus , that set of internalized dispositions that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, connects individual practices to the social context. Here, the practices of the bazaar and baroque economies intertwine with digital logics, redefining the boundaries between formal and informal . A process that, in some ways, involves the same strategies of adaptation and resilience typical of the informal economies of the Global South.
Digital Food is Devouring Naples
Overall, digital micro-entrepreneurship on TikTok is rewriting the rules of the Italian economy: according to a 2024 Oxford Economics report, it generated €1 billion in national GDP and over 11.300 new jobs last year alone. Driving this boom is a new wave of digital entrepreneurs—often under 30 and with a migrant background—who find the Chinese platform a springboard to economic inclusion.
In the Neapolitan context, this revolution takes shape in a unique way, where food becomes not just a product but a meta-narrative, a symbol, and a strategy. From pizzas with surprising toppings, spectacular fried foods, and gastronomically short-circuited remixes of sandwiches filled with Kinder snacks, Neapolitan street food becomes viral content . The platform, rather than flattening, valorizes artisanal know-how and popular aesthetics, transforming TikTok into a veritable digital bazaar where authenticity and innovation coexist in perfect balance.
A “grammar of making do”?
However, to fully understand the sociological dynamics of this transformation, it's necessary to shift our focus from the merely phenomenological to the more structural level. Here, the creativity of micro-food entrepreneurs isn't just improvisation, but rather a refined form of " the grammar of making do ." Neapolitan small entrepreneurs don't just use TikTok: they rewrite it. Through recognizable aesthetics and self-produced narratives, they craft a visual language that combines craftsmanship and algorithms, transforming every piece of content into a commercial and identity-building opportunity.
It is the combination of digital grammar (i.e. the structural rules imposed by the platform) and creative vernacular (the expressive forms born from below) that generates a new consumer culture : more in line with everyday reality, but also capable of bending — or sometimes resisting — the logic of traditional marketing (Caliandro et al., 2024).
Decrypting the phenomenon: the study
A recent study, based on mixed methods rooted in the epistemology of digital sociology, analyzed 100 videos by 10 artisans of taste, many of whom were influenced by Donato De Caprio, a delicatessen owner turned influencer with over 4 million followers and an ideal-typical figure in the Weberian sense of the concept: the emblem of a recurring pattern, rooted in tradition and adapted to the logic of the platform. The analysis, inspired by Roland Barthes's socio-semiotics and its contemporary evolution (Bainotti et al., 2021), highlights how everyday gestures transform into spectacle and artisanal products into viral symbols.
On a denotative level , the contents mainly showcase the product (35%), the strategic use of the app (29%), props (20%) and settings (16%).
At a connotative level , five constants emerge: craftsmanship (34%), technical mastery of the platform (22%), traditional commercial storytelling (20%), Neapolitan irony (19%) and the use of vernacular as a sign of authenticity (5%).
The secret to virality? The analysis revealed that the intertwining of visual data at the denotative level and cultural data at the connotative level gives rise to five recurring communicative formulas: these grammars make Neapolitan gastronomic tradition perfectly compatible with the aesthetics and viral logic of TikTok.
Artisanal grammar: hands that tell stories
It's well known that craftsmanship, in the context of Neapolitan make-do, represents not only an aesthetic and productive value, but also a form of cultural resistance to the logic of industrial standardization and commercial massification. The data speaks clearly for this grammar: the showiness of the product dominates the scene . It is the beating heart of the narrative: a true sacralization of the handmade product , immersed in essential, almost ascetic visual contexts that exalt its authenticity and quality as if on a profane altar of taste. It is a profoundly strategic choice: to showcase ancestral know-how, to make the art passed down from generation to generation shine, to make palpable—even through the vertical and ephemeral format of TikTok videos—the anthropological—and almost mythological—value of Neapolitan craftsmanship in an age of global standardization.
Vernacular Grammar: When Neapolitan Dialect Becomes a Global Cultural Brand
Through the lens of social sciences, the Neapolitan dialect on TikTok isn't just a local color: it's an identity code that communicates authenticity and cultural resilience . In a context dominated by globalization, the platform's logic—based on brevity, immediacy, and viral spontaneity—offers dialect the ideal space to reassert itself as a distinctive feature. This " vernacular " expressiveness doesn't simply revisit the past, but reinterprets it digitally, creating a form of glocalization: the local expressed in the global . Thus, between jokes in Neapolitan and creative sales videos, the food product also becomes a cultural symbol, a bearer of a living and shared identity.
Economic grammar: legacies of commercial theatricalization and strategic storytelling
To decipher the rise of Neapolitan micro-entrepreneurs on TikTok, we must trace the theatrical roots of Neapolitan commercial commerce: in historic markets like Pignasecca, the vendor has always been a performer, a storyteller who transforms goods into spectacle. Today, this tradition is reinventing itself digitally. On TikTok, the new artisans of taste are transformed into the protagonists of high-impact videos, where rhythm, exaggeration, and marketing strategies—like the famous Neapolitan food challenges —rework and amplify the market's ancient rhetoric. The platform's affordances act as a sounding board for a visual grammar that blends popular authenticity and spectacular strategy: the anthropology of the Neapolitan street market is also entering the era of virality.
The Grammar of Irony: A Theatricalization of Neapolitan Food
Irony has its roots in a long tradition of theatricality and linguistic play, expressing an ability to address life's complexities with an irreverent and creative tone. This inclination is deeply reflected in popular culture, finding vivid expressions in the physical and verbal jokes of sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte, the witticisms of nineteenth-century popular theater, and the witty quips and thoughtful monologues of Eduardo De Filippo's theater. In the videos analyzed, irony is identifiable through carefully crafted exaggerations , remixes of traditional elements with modern styles, an unconventional use of memes, superimposed texts, emojis, and much more. A jumble of content, often characterized by surreal or provocative humor, simultaneously reflects the affordances of the platform, which favor the replicability and reinterpretation of content in a humorous vein.
Technical Grammar: The Computational Aesthetics of Cooking
Despite their low-level education, Neapolitan food micro-entrepreneurs demonstrate surprising technical expertise in producing content on TikTok. Through a creative and conscious use of the platform's affordances—effects, filters, transitions, music—they develop memetic and performative visual formats that reveal a practical and situated intelligence . These individuals, often excluded from the formal circuits of digital professionalization, skillfully navigate an environment driven by algorithmic logic, translating market experience into an audiovisual grammar capable of maximizing attention and virality . The result is a form of bottom-up media expertise , where improvisation is intertwined with an astonishing capacity for communicative planning.
Algorithmic foodification: salvation or cultural condemnation?
In conclusion, that which sociologicamente we could identify as “grammatization of making do” It emerges as a sophisticated sociological device through which Neapolitan gastronomic micro-entrepreneurs codify their cultural capital, transforming it into a strategic asset for negotiating privileged positions in TikTok's hypercompetitive algorithmic attention economy.
It's clear that this phenomenon has even led to a profound transformation of cultural identity, and the boom in Neapolitan Foodification represents the most significant epiphany of this transformation. The other side of the coin, however, reveals a disturbing flipside: the hegemony of food-centric narratives is accelerating processes of urban tourism that are progressively eroding the traditional cultural fabric. Historic bookstores, centuries-old newsstands, and artisan workshops are succumbing to the speculative pressure triggered by the hypermediatization of street food, while foodporn aesthetics colonize the Neapolitan collective imagination on TikTok. Thus, we are witnessing a paradoxical engulfment of Neapolitan expressive plurality by the one-dimensional imperative of spectacularized gastronomic consumption, which is transforming working-class neighborhoods into theme parks of taste, sacrificing the complexity of a millennia-old cultural heritage on the altar of the algorithm.
Gabriele Sorrentino
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