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By Root 671 0

The dramatic years of Mani pulite [Clean Hands) in the i 99os had ushered in a new era of moral as well as political accountability, and this included a strong sense of civic duty.22 The new civic sensibility affected all areas of engagement with state and local administrations. The younger faction in the condominium was led by a man in the medical profession, which perhaps also reinforced its commitment to a formal code of ethics and transparency. The older residents counted instead on ideals of civility for the common good among coevals of widely differing levels of education and social status. Among them, the organization head was a former ironworker who had gradually built up a career as a behind-the-scenes local political operator with ties to one of the most tainted of the older parties. One of his opponents described him in these terms: "a bit of a sweet-talker, a bit ... [someone] who works underneath [i.e., in a concealed fashion], look, he tends to insinuate himself into those spaces where there's something to be gained, that's what I believe." The merchant, with whom the political operator quarreled all the time but with whom he nevertheless had close and affectionate ties, told stories of crooked doings in the markets that were a source of unending entertainment and instruction for me. He had lived in the building since the 193os and was the longest-established resident; he was strongly backed by a woman whose mother-in-law had owned the apartment where he now lived and who thus also, with her husband, had a long-standing stake in the building. One of their critics remarked, "They continued to operate the building in their own way, making modifications and readjustments, even structural ones, with the administrator's support; the administrator always gave them his support."

The merchant thought the old administrator suited his style just fine: "He's a saint, Michael, and hey, off we go!" (E un santo, Miche, e nnamo, o!) That kind of sanctity was hardly of the state's formal civic order, perhaps still less of the church's, and the opposition disagreed with this judgment; to make matters worse, the merchant and his friends had miscalculated the number of people who supported their desire to keep on doing business as usual.

It would be wrong to suppose that the older group was without respect for procedure; they simply did not view it in abstractly moral terms. Rather, they openly treated legal correctness as a strategic weapon (as the merchant had already demonstrated to devastating effect when he blackmailed the other partners over the deal with the barber's wife; and they also realized that the younger members were invoking civic procedure as a strategy for possibly quite self-interested (if unspecified purposes of their own. The fact that the administrator was willing, albeit with a very worried expression during most of the proceedings, to preside over what was potentially a humiliation for him is itself an indication of some shared sense of civic responsibility. He was flanked by two of his supporters, the ironworkerturned-political operator and a woman who served as the condominium's record keeper. At various points in the argument, critics also came up to the front of the room to make their arguments more dramatically. The younger group also did not hesitate to engage in shouting and ironic backchat, and one of the loudest voices of all came from a young man who represented himself as defending clarity and simplicity-making sure, as became evident, that the central question of the administrator's future did not evade inspection as other residents became absorbed in their concerns over specific details of what had or had not been done to keep the building in a decent state of repair.

Much of the meeting was taken up with counting votes. This was not as simple as it might sound. The administrator initially tried to ram through a decision in his favor by claiming that the vote for a new administrator had failed since the number of shares ]based on the size of the partners' respective apartments] gained by