Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [11]
Meetings and demonstrations thus span a range of spaces and degrees of formality. The most important moments of communication in all these occasions are often transient and evanescent, conveyed in a sudden gesture or a hint in the voice. Even in some of the more formal meetings, I often thought that the real decisions were taken in those quick exchanges after the formal business was completed. The thicker the dialect, it seemed, the more significant the information conveyed. Formality was not the Romans' preferred order of interaction, although they often mastered its rules and parodied its procedures. For them a quick exchange over coffee in a bar, or while strolling with their children across the Piazzetta with its sixteenth-century marble fountain and its busy newsstand, offered more reliable insights.
The Village in the City
This reflects the frequently repeated perception that Monti was a village (paese)-an intimate term of social inclusion that also has implications of territoriality and rusticity.'8 In the way that nostalgia often seems to contradict itself, residents would often remark both that the district retained this village-like character in that one met one's friends in the street all the time, and that it had ceased to do so. Those who emphasized change recalled that even the poorest resident had formerly been able to point to a whole street full of uncles, aunts, and cousins, and that people would swap food items from their market shopping to increase the variety of their frugal fare and where they would greet each other and then burst into cheerful song.
Until the r96os and the beginning of the present inflation of the real estate market, many Monti artisans lived on the edge of penury. But a warm sociability, they now assert, alleviated this harsh reality; families would gather at small trattorie, or wine-and-oil shops-several houses still sport lintel inscriptions advertising vini and olio as well as the presence of a forno (bakery)-and share out the food (especially bread and cheese) that some of the men, known in this role as fagottari, would bring wrapped up in a kerchief (fagotto) that was folded in a distinctive and immediately recognizable manner. Such establishments, bars, and occasional shops would serve as the gathering places for rotating-credit associations; indeed, a few still do. But the sociality of yesteryear cannot survive in a world in which the drinking taverns have either disappeared or become modishly expensive bars and pubs.
Today, said one, "no one sings any more... we're all fakes now" (Mo non canta ph) nessuno... Siamo tutti finti adesso). The narrative switch from the Romanesco Roman dialect) word mo to the standard Italian adesso both meaning "now"), with the positioning of the Italian adesso at the end of the sentence adding further emphasis, reproduces a sense of shifting through time-the time of the sentence reproducing the historical sequence-from affectionate neighborliness to the bland and perhaps hypocritical politeness of modern national culture.
Such traces achingly recall times past, or what those times are now fondly imagined to have been. Once a barber's client remarked that he had been waiting for two hours; when the barber started to respond a little defensively, the customer explained that he had meant it as a compliment-that here, alone in all of Rome, he could still see people greeting each other warmly as friends. But the barber's initial defensiveness shows how new ideals-here, of punctuality-have already invaded and restructured the idioms of social interaction.
When I began my fieldwork in 1999, one could occasionally still see an elderly person lowering a large basket (sporta) from a balcony to the street to receive groceries and other supplies; but this is a rare sight now, and people no longer talk from balcony to balcony as they once did. A woman living on the ground floor of a building in which all the tenants were resisting