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By Root 686 0

to the Austrian police instead. I continued to argue that as a witness I should be allowed to submit some kind of report of what I knew; and, after first reminding me that the law was inflexible, the officer relented to the extent of saying that they could indeed make a report on the basis of my testimonybut that I would not be allowed to see that document. In the end, the police suggested, the best solution was for the colleague, a Greek citizen, to make a report to the Greek embassy in Rome, where I also had a good contact and could follow up if necessary. Nothing more was ever heard of the matter. Given that the denuncia often seems to serve only to shelve a problem forever, the citizen of a foreign state reporting on the misadventure of a citizen of another foreign state was unlikely to get much satisfaction.

For Italians, the denuncia is embedded in something much more dangerous than police procedure; it always entails a real risk of retaliation. Citizens who complained about illegal installations that were causing smoke pollution would be told in nocturnal phone calls that they were in serious danger, and complaints to the police produced nothing more than sympathetic shrugs and a practically meaningless official notation. These threatening calls are untraceable, especially because the victim would first have to go to the police station and make out yet another formal denuncia before the police could act, at which point it was inevitably much too late to find any trace of the callers' identities.

Submitting a denuncia can even be fatal, as the fishmonger who denounced his loan shark discovered. When the city official for commercial affairs asserted in a public statement that any victim of usury who failed to denounce the lender was complicit in the crime, the fishmonger's widow was understandably outraged (although the general principle that failure to denounce constitutes complicity actually applies to crimes of all kinds); the city authorities expect one to speak out, she said, but then leave those courageous enough to do so completely exposed to the vengeance of the perpetrators. Yet without a denuncia, again as in so many other situations, the police can claim to have no basis for action.

In practice the greater complicity is not that of the silent victims. It is the virtual complicity of those who have the power to intervene but who invoke the requirement that a denuncia be submitted first no matter what the cost to the plaintiff. A brake on the very type of intervention it is supposed to authorize, the denuncia thus effectively renders the authorities complicit in the persistence of threats and other symbolic forms of violence. It also, and concomitantly, absolves the police of blame for their failure to respond quickly to the committal of a crime, since the law makes the prior complaint the express responsibility of the victim except in such extreme matters as murder. The delay caused by the requirement of a formal complaint is thus arguably as much a contributory cause to the success of petty criminals as is the dangerously self-exculpatory conviction, expressed by one senior carabiniere, that small crimes were all committed by immigrants, or as is the weakened vigilance brought about by the shattering of local forms of sociality and especially by the departure of artisans who used to watch the street as a matter of course. By the same token, the requirement obstructs police officers who might genuinely wish to act expeditiously. The fact that it is the citizen's responsibility to lodge such complaints, which are also required for claiming both recovered stolen goods and insurance, feeds the permissive tempo of Roman life and thereby protects the criminals and perhaps also some bureaucrats.

Even-or perhaps especially-when the authors of an illegal act cannot be identified, a denuncia is required for any further official action to occur. In those circumstances it is simply called "a complaint against unknown persons" (denuncia contro ignoti). The term denuncia could perhaps be translated simply as "report"-except