Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [138]
Spatial and Stylistic Violence
Competing reconfigurations of lived space lie at the heart of social change in Monti and throughout the historic center of Rome. An emergent sense of civic responsibility is usually not robust enough to shield against either eviction from domestic places or exclusion from public ones; it is also, arguably, undercut by hopes of increasing profit from the new arrivals on the part of those local merchants whose businesses have managed to survive the initial flurry of change. During the jubilee year, some shops were protected from eviction by special edict. But the predominant motivating force is that of rapid reconfiguration and comes largely from outside the district. Regardless of their relationship with the locality, entrepreneurs who have little interest in the neighborhood in any socially meaningful sense, but who have plentiful money and political influence, can shape the new spatial configurations more or less with impunity, refashioning what were once artisans' shops and homes into brash tourist restaurants, bars, and pubs, private pied-a-terre apartments for movers and shakers, and bed-and-breakfast hideaways aimed at a supposedly discerning type of tourist."
One of the most contentious issues arises from the bars and restaurants that have expanded their operations onto sidewalks and public squares. Tourists are usually charmed by this phenomenon; it allows them to sip their aperitifs amidst the beauty of the Renaissance and baroque buildings in the rich sunset warmth of a Roman spring or autumn. For local residents, however, it is a much more dubious blessing. The owners of these establishments are generally determined to push their luck as far as they can. Their defiance of an increasingly specific set of legal codes is self-confirming; the more they get away with breaking the ever more-visible legal restrictions, the more they can impose their will through a combination of unctuous courtesy and the fear that it engenders. The occupation of public space and the illegal extension into it of privately owned property for new kinds of economic gain provide the spatial and temporal frameworks for much of the conflict that now plagues the entire city.29
This is a process that draws effectively on a civility that is far from civic. One amiable rogue, I was told, "has no civic sensibility" (non ha it senso civico); this charge included offenses ranging from violations of sanitary and environmental regulations to a brazen attempt to take over a segment of sidewalk, ostensibly for the beautification of his shop but in fact in order to stop others from parking in front (with no greater legality than his own preemptive move, to be sure). Yet his social manner is certainly civil-so warmly and entertainingly so, in fact, that it contributes to the constant tactical discomfiture of his many detractors, as do his useful connections with people in power.
Taking over a sidewalk or a section of a square is not merely an act of territorial expropriation; it is also a threat, promising both more of the same and dire consequences to anyone foolish enough to resist. When citizens' complaints produce absolutely no effect, the message becomes even clearer; the fact that the perpetrators have never been charged with a crime protects both their reputations and their activities. Once they have successfully passed the initial risk of a serious legal challenge, audacity lends durability to their defiance of the law. Nothing succeeds like impunity.
The very names of some offending structures appear to offer referential force to the subtle architectural menace. Most Monticiani are convinced that two restaurants,