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By Root 639 0

attitudes. For leftists, for example, memories of parents and grandparents tortured by Nazi collaborators or excluded from decent jobs because of their political past remain a source of considerable bitterness. For two decades after the end of World War II, street fights still erupted between the two opposing camps; some tell with pride of the violence they experienced. When I began my research I was struck by the relative ease of association I found between people who, a decade or two earlier, would have belonged to the mutually hostile camps of "Catholics" and "Communists" and who still tended to identify with these labels. These opposing political camps have now morphed into a pair of loose coalitions, the product of the reworking of political ideology after the collapse of the old Christian Democrat and Socialist parties in the aftermath of the corruption scandals of the i98os and the demise of the Soviet Union in r99i. Memories still persist of violent street battles, in which right-wing toughs-now often identified with the neofascists of the Alleanza nazionale-brought clubs smashing down on the heads of the equally enraged Communist youths. These scenes have not been forgotten, but the memories are refracted through more evanescent and opportunistic political alignments.

In the course of a quarrel about the use of equipment posing environmental safety hazards, a couple of left-wing carpenters reported a local shopkeeper to the carabinieri. The merchant, himself a former Communist street-fighter, responded by telling one of them, "I'll send you my friends.... and I'll close you[r shop] down"-a form of intimidation that, said the scandalized carpenter, had been typical of the old Christian Democrats. He seemed more outraged by such supposedly right-wing behavior on the part of a fellow Communist than by the fact of the threat itself. For a Communist to have threatened his enemy with the intervention of "friends"-local city police rather than the national-level carabinieri-did indicate a startling reversal, especially as these city officers are known today for both their rightist sympathies and the ease with which they can be bought. On the other hand, the merchant's key protector is allegedly a left-wing ward politician who deserted the old Communist Party when it collapsed and then rejoined its successor, the Democratici di Sinistra, when their fortunes appeared to be rebounding.

In fact, the merchant's illegal activities were first brought to the attention of his neighbors by a local boss of known Fascist sympathies, who told the neighbors that this man was placing large flowerboxes across the sidewalk in front of his shop. The boss had no affection for the Communist tradesman, with whom he had tangled in the past, but he was also not prepared to commit himself to making a formal complaint in his own name, and the city police would do nothing without a formal complaint from a source outside their own ranks. Rather cleverly, then, the boss, one of the last of the capi rione, instead provoked other leftists into organizing the attack. Not only did this allow him to conceal his own role, but it set the Communists at odd with each other; and the tradesman's curt refusal to remove the offending flowerboxes drove an irreparable breach in his political as well as social relations, which were further damaged by the protracted quarrel about the environmental disturbance caused by some smoke vents that the tradesman had illegally installed.

Motivations are clearly no longer purely party-political, if indeed they ever were; but the language of hostility remains deeply inflected by the old polarity. Political identities become instrumental, losing ideological clarity in the process. Thus, dislike of a neighbor, or attempts to justify nonintervention in the plight of evictees, can take the form of political slurs: "He's a big Fascist" ~fascistone)-this, of a committed left-winger, son of a prominent local Communist, who nonetheless married into a right-wing family and eventually found himself unable to avoid accepting the support