• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

These slurs are nevertheless often temporary and situational attributions. Most of the time, people of very different political identities rub along reasonably well together, their affable greetings a deliberately?~ thin disguise for their never entirely eradicable mutual suspicion. Today there is sometimes an almost affectionate tone to many of the evocations of past conflict. Romans prefer to engage with and tease each other rather than avoid any contact at all. A janitor who had also been a policeman in his younger days was widely regarded as a Fascist; he constantly tried to probe my activities, and I got the distinct impression that he thought I was some sort of troublemaking agent; I later discovered that he had thought I might be a spy. Reciprocally, a left-wing friend who enjoyed baiting policemen told me that this man had actively provoked Monti leftists as part of a wider rightist plot to create unrest and so prepare the ground for a coup.

Political differences usually emerge less in violent confrontation than in this kind of gossip and teasing. Such indirect modalities allow considerable play to ambiguity and do not damage the surface civility of daily interaction. The abstract ideal was described to me by one literary-minded shopkeeper as that of the Three Musketeers: "one for all and all for one." The evidence for concerted, rione-wide action in the past is nevertheless quite scanty. Courteous accommodation creates a smooth surface, but it can contribute, at least indirectly, to the pervasive sense of fear, uncertainty, and internal division, since the desire to avoid unnecessary confrontation also leaves little space for sustaining any kind of concerted defense of collective interests.

Peaceful Politics

This local situation reflects political changes at the national level. As Putnam has noted for the country as a whole, direct confrontation between Left and Right has given way to a sometimes uneasy civility.13 But local factors are also important. Activists for one leftist group explained to me that in Monti their party had failed to maintain its territorial control, in decided contrast with Campo de' Fiori-where the continuing presence of a party office has meant that even nonmembers continue to vote for the party because their families participate in its everyday activities ("the father came there to work [for the party], the mother came to cook the pasta"). The Monti office was closed down, allegedly by a cabal of party members, including a local member who was especially disliked for his alleged association with a suspected usurer and money launderer.

Some thought that this member feared he was at risk of expulsion from the party; and, that, having unsuccessfully tried to run for election with a different party, he knew that his continuing influence depended on being able to control the party's local representation. The result of closing the district office down altogether had been, not surprisingly, a progressive weakening of the party's local influence, which was already dwindling at an alarming rate in an area hitherto known for its "red" politics. Ironically, however, the closure may also have weakened the kind of personal politics that motivated it in the first place; the more civic-minded local artisans and workers were increasingly unwilling to tolerate even unproven cases of corruption, and found support among young activists alarmed at the party's precipitous-and embarrassing-local decline. Among the artisans, in particular, a reluctance to tie themselves to specific causes or individuals, and an appreciation of autonomy in themselves and others, worked in favor of the more civic-minded politicians and party workers, to the detriment of both some right-wing patrons who viewed artisans as a category of merchants and thus as part of their own constituency) and those leftists who were trying to play the rightists at their own favor-peddling game; as a result, paradoxically,