Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [122]
But culture is also a positive term of political self-identification; those who share a party-political background tend to emphasize the commonalities that bind them. Thus, a Monti butcher whose family has lived in the same house since 1704 (and who are thus among the small minority who have "always" owned their own dwellings) described himself and his immediate kin as being of the cultura of the class of proprietors but of left-wing ideology. The term cultura is often used to describe and even explain the attitudes associated with a profession; a jeweler professed himself unimpressed by the "not inconsiderable cultural background" (retrocultura non indifferente) of those who used the fact of their families' having been in the business for five generations.10 It may also stand for a political ideology; the butcher shifted the term's meaning when he also described himself as culturalmente de sinistra culturally of the Left) to explain why he objected to newspaper headlines that identified the nationality of Albanian but not of Italian criminals."
More generally the term cultura describes a set of habits that signify a person's economic standing; poorer people, for example, might say that they never owned their own home because such was not their cultura. But it can also have much more focused meanings, as in the case of a man whose cultura was defined by his habit of reading newspapers all day long. The butcher's acknowledgment of a conflict between his class origins and his political ideology, an ideology that he absorbed from his immediate family as a child, represents in perhaps an extreme form the Roman capacity for political accommodation at the social level.
This feature continues into his own social world; he supports left-wing political groups but also speculates in small-scale property activities and provokes the ire of more puristic neighbors because of his willingness to cooperate with business associates of a more obviously speculative brand. Perhaps his shifting use of the term cultura reflects such accommodations. Despite his fondly remembered past as a leftist street fighter, many of his customers and friends are of firmly right-wing persuasion. In these matters, he is far from atypical; and I was often struck by the ease with which people of very different political stripe mingled and even collaborated. A leftwing restaurateur married to an immigrant had no difficulty in introducing me to a literally black-shirted Fascist of aristocratic origins, an admirer of Mussolini in whose house a family crest and a photograph of Mussolini greeting "his people" appeared to hold roughly equivalent places of honor. A vocally left-wing bar proprietor hailed an architect and former Alleanza nazionale district councilor and teased him as a "Fascist," then turned to me and remarked on how typical of Italy it was that here he was being friends with this Fascist-though it should be said that this is a phenomenon of perhaps only twenty years' standing. A barber's shop remains one of specific places where people of vastly different political convictions can drop by, read a newspaper, and, perhaps, have their hair cut. Occasional eruptions of political disagreement provide the entertainment, calmly presided over with studious neutrality by the stately barber himself; I met this politically conservative and thoroughly respectable citizen through a family with very different ideological proclivities. When I asked their son, an active local politician with the Democratici di sinistra, why the family also bought its groceries from a known neofascist, he replied, "Food doesn't have a color; it only has a smell"-and the neofascist had the best produce.
These enduring and practical compromises are important. We often read of the dualistic nature of Italian political life, and there is no doubt that the sometimes vicious battles between the two poles have left indelible marks on people's