Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [113]
Accommodation is written into the fabric of the city itself; beyond the palimpsest of amnestied architectural infractions, other inconvenient histories also persist. The Fascist insignia on the parish church's war memorial in this predominantly left-wing district, for example, were allowed to remain because their destruction, achieved virtually everywhere else, would have insulted the Monti families whose young men had died in an ignoble cause. Church and people are united at least on this one point, that the only viable approach to human imperfection is a pragmatics of compromise-and Romans pride themselves on exemplifying that feature in being, as they say, accommodanti. The city's appearance today is as much a monument to that spirit of compromise as it is to the grandeur of the officially recognized past.
Indeed, a furniture restorer argued that the local approach to the building code, and especially to the refurbishing of old houses protected by the conservation laws, was to "let things go" ~lascia correre~, an attitude that he specifically described as a "tacit compromise" dun tacito compromesso~. It is an attitude shared by the civic authorities, who, for a small consideration, are likely to respond to a request to make some alteration that would normally be considered illegal by granting permission, but take care to avoid some other alteration that might attract too much interest-a classic compromise, again. For the furniture restorer, his work is less a matter of historical accuracy than of fixing (sistemare) broken or damaged fixtures and ornaments in order to improve the quality of living conditions. It was not even necessary to make architectural changes surreptitiously at night when one could rely on the connivance of neighbors.
"Letting things go" is an expression of the noninvolvement that characterizes Romans' grandiloquent contempt for arguments they cannot win. A Communist butcher, faced with discussions about the existence of God, refused to be drawn, but avoided the question with a gesture that Italian viewers of my film Monti Moments consistently interpret as a refusal to take sides. He claimed that he did not possess the intellectual genius required to get to the bottom of such weighty questions: "I just let it [the issue] go" (io lo lascio perde'). His is not so much a stance of fatalistic resignation as a highly pragmatic assessment of political realities; one attempts to keep on good terms with all possible factions and to entertain even the most outlandish possibilities. In the stylistic promiscuity of house restoration, this accommodating attitude is also inscribed in the physical fabric of the city. Officials, as much as residents, sometimes find that is simpler just to let matters go by.
The awkwardness with which Monticiani discuss the question of usury illustrates, in a rather backhanded manner, their clear-headed realization that life must always be a series of compromises-and, above all, that human life is by its very nature riddled with imperfections. As with the priests' dilemmas of conscience over the eviction of parishioners, so lay people must search within their innermost selves to determine whether the loans they are making are acceptably free of the desire to profit at the expense of others. In the absence of desire for such profit the sin entailed in the gains themselves may be minor, a part of the original heritage of all earthly beings. But the line between acceptable and excessive profit is never