Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [12]
A garage attendant recalled the old Monti social idiom as "more neorealist" in the cinematic sense-an invocation of filmmakers like Fellini and Pasolini, with their evocations of a picaresque intimacy, that I was to meet often.19 As another resident put it, recalling both the frequent conviviality on the street to the accompaniment of guitar and mandolin and the simpler living conditions such as a complete lack of heating in the winter: "We were a peasant culture.... Then, with the wind of the economic boom, we became industrialized."
Much of the regret is about the passing of care for the weak and unprotected. The old neighborhood bosses saw their role as especially that of protecting women from harassment and ensuring that the poor were not mistreated. And sometimes there were adventures. During the grim, fooddeprived months of the German occupation of Rome in 1943, two men done of them a carabiniere) broke into the barracks that the German sol diers had sequestered and stole a large box of rationing coupons. Another kinsman gave the coupons out to the poor; but, as the son of one of these men recalled, had anyone tried to steal them, he would have been knifed to death. The sense of communal solidarity also encompassed the possibility of retributive violence; but it was violence in defense of a moral community.
Some traces of this solidarity, too, remain. When an old woman was evicted from her apartment, the sister-in-law of one of the last true underworld bosses to have operated in Monti organized a support fund, so that customers picking up their wash would each time leave i o,ooo or 20,000 lire as an anonymous contribution. Those who donated were merchants with shops nearby; many of them had lived for decades in the area and saw in the old lady the sad relic of their once vibrant social life.
One plaintive remnant of that old sense of collective identity is an elderly, bearded man, neatly dressed for the most part but muttering and shuffling as he paces the streets, occasionally erupting in drunken anger. Locals give him food, cigarettes, and sometimes money, gently refusing his own plaintive attempts to reciprocate by returning the odd cigarette or banknote, and make sure he has a safe place to sleep at night; indeed, he was eventually given a more permanent berth beside one of the sidewalks. Some say he was once a skilled physician but suffered a catastrophic illness. His erratic perambulations evoke only sympathy and kindness. Everyone knows him and addresses him by name, and people often remark on his highly educated, formal style of speech.
His familiar eccentricities and outbursts evoke more amused affection than contempt. Occasionally someone gives him work; once, when the manageress of a small supermarket for which he was unloading crates of detergent and toothpaste told him not to mix them up, he irritably retorted, "But toothpaste is a detergent!" When he ambled into a Japanese restaurant in search of a free cigarette one day, the owner of a neighboring store went in after him and gently persuaded him to leave again; the storekeeper then explained to me that on a previous occasion he had been very drunk and broke a glass panel in the restaurant and the Japanese woman who runs it had been afraid of him ever since-so the storekeeper wished to spare her further terror!
Monticiani attribute the resilience of their compassion for street people to the fact that the new rich who have moved into Monti are predominantly of left-wing political persuasion and a cynic might add that it gives them some absolution from the guilt of