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By Root 655 0

admitted, "The rebellion started to form, in effect, after I came to the building, I'm the last of them to arrive. Because there were no accounts." The fact that the old administrator had long failed to convene annual meetings not only provoked the nascent rebellion but played into its leaders' hands, because they were entitled, under the terms of the code, to convene a meeting without the administrator if a third of the residents so wished. That quorum was easily reached as discontent came to a head. The old administrator's supporters suddenly became advocates of transparency: "They created secret societies, they met, they discussed, they deliberated, they spoke, they ratified-that Giuliani had to go-there, that's the truth."

Most strongly apparent in this entire confrontation is the apparent victory of a civic-minded group over the easygoing civility of the past; but it is a victory that still owes much to the civility that still prevailed among most of the main actors, and that entailed a measure of compromise in the final resolution of not actually dismissing the old administrator for the moment. A rhetoric of civic correctness prevailed overall; the rough language (much of it dialect-inflected) of the older group, its uncouth threats, and poor clothing placed it at a tactical disadvantage, especially as all knew perfectly well that its members were mostly interested in maintaining a convenient but illegal modality. Its cultural capital, which lay in a nostalgic appeal to an image of old Rome, could not stem the tide of change.

The younger group was equally strategic, and more successfully so. Its leader's demand that the proxy document be produced, a seemingly uncivil gesture among old neighbors, was-as both he and the old merchant knewa way of making sure of a vote that had previously been firmly promised in support of the proposed firing. The younger group thus acted, as the traditionalists understood all too well, to impose their own will through the adroit manipulation of voting rules.

Perhaps, from their point of view, the tactical means justified the ends of civic order. They particularly objected to the fact that participation in decision-making had become extremely one-sided. "But what we are complaining about above all with the administrator was the fact that, that he has misled us, that he has managed all ... the whole condominium in agreement with two or three [of the members alone]." The rhetoric is about democratic management, the concern it frames one of self-respect and authority.

The issue of the barber and his wife, now jointly responsible for keeping the building clean, was also still very much alive, since some of the younger members thought that they should pay some of the condominium costs as a matter of principle. Again, this view was driven less by economic considerations than by the perception that the younger faction had ignominiously lost out to the machinations of the merchant and his ally, the old administrator, and that perhaps it was now time to turn the tables on the two of them in this regard as well.23

The condominial meeting as a whole illustrates the dangers inherent in trying to create too strong a sense of categorical contrast between older and newer moralities. It makes no sense to treat some segments of the population as traditional, southern in their values and attitudes, focused on issues of respect and self-regard, and uninterested in civic order, in contrast to modernists with the opposite set of values. The contrast is a rhetorical one, between stereotypes that were both very markedly in play on both sides of the dispute. It is certainly true that the two factions sought contrasted kinds of advantage: the older a range of short-term benefits with an accompanying long-term assurance of sociability, the younger conformity with the law and with it more effective control over the way their money was spent. But these stances were stylized and exaggerated; in their proxy rhetorics of civic procedure and civil sociability, they proved not to be mutually exclusive at all. Instead,