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By Root 704 0

the artisans' conservatism served as a force for change. Even though the numbers of those concerned were small, they were enough to tip the balance; leftist election posters appeared in artisans' shop windows for the first time in living memory, heralding a growing rejection of some of the old, self-perpetuating civilities. Those merchants who were unable for did not dared to claw their way out of the offending member's clutches presumably also voted for the left-wing coalition. In late 2000 Monti returned to its old political coloration, returning a solid majority for a locally rejuvenated Left for the first time in a decade and a half, with a 6 percent increase in leftist votes over the regional elections a few months before, when the Lazio region-like much of the rest of Italy-had lurched to the Right. But the tone and content of political debate had changed on the other end of the spectrum as well. Not to be outdone by the new purism of younger leftists, local Alleanza nazionale Party activists increasingly sounded like the old Communists, with a puristic rhetoric of workers' rights and clean civic process and with their eager opportunism in support of those evicted from their homes in the course of accelerating gentrification.

Political debate has thus changed, with significantly less emphasis on the schematic ideological differences of earlier years than on how, and how far, to dismantle the remaining sources of corruption in civic life. The muchvaunted accommodation of the Roman social style now comes increasingly into conflict with such participatory ideals of civic governance. The intense localism that Berardino Palumbo calls "civic identity"14 -but that here I would prefer to dub "local civility"-is increasingly hard to reconcile with the civic rationalism of either the state or of international institutions. It is not clear that it will yield significantly to the appeal of these extrinsic forces; those who operate with the polite corruption of earlier times have certainly not been uprooted, and in some cases have been more brazen than ever in their instrumental evocation of peculiarly Roman idioms of cultural intimacy. Even those who want radical change continue to operate in a localist idiom; many of the youngest of the left-wing party activists, for example, continue to emphasize their Romanesco speech and their embed- dedness in local social networks-these are, after all, the immediate basis of their ability to appeal effectively to voters. The debate is increasingly less between the civil and the civic than between civic engagement and civic acquiescence-a very different battle, and one that reproduces on a local scale ongoing tensions between the desire for active participatory rights in determining the course of local events and a global neoliberalism for which such local self-assertion is threatening and inconvenient.

Italian neoliberalism, however, also invokes local idioms; this is the underlying logic of gentrification in Rome and elsewhere." In the same way, the marketing of the national picturesque takes such localisms as romanitd and purveys them as tourist goods, new forms of folksy elegance, and the political posturing that one of the Monti evictees repeatedly condemned as radical-chic (parlor pinkery). Both left- and right-wing political alignments were caught between the desire to please local voters by involving them and supporting their causes, and, on the other hand, the powerful forces that favored the restructuring of social life according to the logic of the international market. That market in fact amplified a phenomenon that was already strongly present in Italian cultural and political life: the abiding tension between local pride and awareness that the very essence of civilta entails a capacity to operate outside purely local interests and borders.

In Palumbo's analysis of Sicilian localism there is an important clue to the relationship between the civic and the civil in Italy more generally. It is clear that what he calls "civic identity," the collective pride that the denizens of