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By Root 581 0

or drug dealers, he asserted, "and we always had to send them packing." People knew their local roles; until recently men and women were often known by their professional identities-er macel- laro the butcher, er tassinaro (the taxi driver, and so on-rather than by name. Even when several members of a profession lived close together, some unique professional label would ensure recognition. Among those so labeled a deep complicity against the interference of predatory outsiders, including state officials, prevailed. This complicity, akin to the mafia rule of silence (omertd, a term sometimes invoked in such contexts, was nevertheless remarkably fragile. In a city where the local police were drawn from the ranks of the Roman working class, it could easily be penetrated by informers and persistently inquisitive officials.

The fragility of social life often evokes contrasts with a nostalgically reconstituted past. A male jeweler lamented the difficulty of getting artisans to cooperate with each other in defending their collective interests: "There's no longer the unity here that we used to have." This nostalgia consolidates a strong sense of class identity. That district was much more overwhelmingly "popular" (popolare, working-class) in the remembered past. The few truly wealthy or aristocratic individuals who were considered to be true Monti people once comfortably coexisted, so present-day residents claim, cheekby-jowl with the working poor. The importance of such assertions is to decry the current situation, especially the adverse effects of gentrification. They also obscure memories of a Catholic mutualism that was anything but egalitarian.22

One such aristocrat, the nineteenth-century Marchese del Grillo, remains a particularly important figure in Monti myth and memory-an irascible aristocrat, a favorite of the Vatican, who nurtured working-class retainers in the area around his palazzo dominating the upper reaches of the district, high athwart the road that separates Monti from the ancient forum. A popular Romanesco comedy about the Marchese del Grillo still plays to appreciative audiences. Yet such figures were not as benign in life as comedy may make them appear today. The politeness that eased interaction between the few aristocrats and wealthy merchants on the one hand and the working-class artisans on the other was never mistaken for an expression of equality. Even the humorous recollections of past interactions are tinged with the violence of another age. I was told that the marchese once asked the pope for permission to throw stones at passing Jews; the pope told him that the Jews were under the Vatican's protection and should not be put in so much danger, so the marchese, apparently without exciting papal disapproval, decided to throw raw potatoes at them instead. Protection, whether as petty extortionism for a parked car or as papal paternalism toward a conveniently cowed religious minority, can be a heavy burden for those who have no choice but to accept its dubious benefits, and popular accounts are tinged with the realization that the difference between aristocratic and ecclesiastical attitudes to the Jews and to the working classes, respectively, was one of degree rather than of kind.

Modernist understandings of class, by contrast, refract it in spatially more direct and clear-cut fashion. The ownership of space itself becomes a marker of class identity, with what were once the apartments of the poorest inhabitants now becoming symbolic markers of cultural distinction. As a result, the continuing presence of the poor and the uncouth in an area undergoing gentrification has come to strike the new arrivals in particular as incompatible with their pretensions. A pitiless market drives this process. As a result, no fondly recalled former standard of civility now protects the weak against the uncivil courtesies of wealthy speculators-known, appropriately enough, as palazzinari (apartment block people."

Agonies and Agonistics

Rome is now an elegant national capital and international center. At the