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By Root 620 0

to maintain at least a facade of respectability, however, they did not lift a finger to help them when they were caught. Today, even the most law-abiding residents would resort to at least the threat of violence in the face of some of the new forms of criminal activity. One outwardly rather gentle and quite elderly shopkeeper showed me a small knife that he had quietly placed on the counter when two obviously foreign customers he thought looked rather shifty entered his shop; when, on their way out, they helped themselves to a couple of peaches, he forced them to return, insisting, as he suggestively fingered the little weapon, "Either you pay or you leave it here!"

In this world of controlled violence, usury is not new; indeed, not only did it draw on the model of the rotating credit association, but it also characteristically claimed local people rather than strangers as its primary victims. Here the criminals, although not connected to the old moral universe of the bosses, are themselves necessarily local, although a few are members of larger gangs with ramified operations far beyond the confines of a single district.

The local economy is one in which, even today, small tradespeople run informal accounts to be paid on a weekly or monthly basis; this practice (known as segnare, "jotting") is now technically illegal, but it is very hard to discover because, although it is a classic instance of local accommodation with the law ("Yes, people do it, but you [technically] can't do it"), it necessarily only exists among those who have good reason to trust each other and indeed is often a reciprocal arrangement, as, for example, between a restaurateur and a bar proprietor). Keeping a running tab in this way builds trust among merchants because, while the seller may get no direct financial advantage from it (although the social capital that accrues is considerable 16) its illegality can encapsulate a form of tax evasion that leaves both parties open to mutual blackmail but that is more likely to establish a wary rapport between them. The seller starts the tab with a piece of professional equipment that buyers, all fellow merchants, can claim (even untruthfully!) to use for professional purposes, on the basis of which they can discount its price from the total value-added tax (Iva) to be paid on their own sales. To this tab are added all sorts of minor items until the payment on the tab comes due. These items are likely to be of no professional use whatsoever, but, as the seller writes an overall receipt (fattura) in which the original item is listed as having the total value of the tab, it is only the seller who pays the tax on these smaller items as well.

Today, some residents lament that such arrangements are disappearing because there is no more trust (flducia)-a reason sometimes also cited for the collapse of the old rotating credit associations-or because customers are no longer afraid of losing face (perdere faccia), shame (vergogna) being the only instrument of debt recovery that occasionally did work for the associations. The complaint about current attitudes is familiar: "There's no longer any shame. When there's no longer any shame, people don't respect anything." But I also heard quite enough stories about customers who in the distant past had cheated local merchants to convince me that this tale of decline was really little more than nostalgia for the now-disappearing urban village of popular imagination. It seems more plausible to credit the changes to the larger shifts in the economic sphere and the attendant banalization of antisocial acts.

Interestingly, merchants still feel pressure to allow clients the privilege of a running tab: "You do it because you're obliged to-what can one do?" This presumption of obligation as well as the illegality of the arrangement, moreover, create an intimate collusion, made all the more piquant if either party happens to subscribe to the idea that trust is on the wane; betrayal would have disastrous consequences for both. From an economic standpoint, too, merchants only dare