Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [142]
The term represents a departure from the old local order. One did not, for example, make a denuncia about stolen property, such as a bicycle, if it was possible instead to recover it through mediation. It is stranieri- literally, "foreigners," but in fact simply non-local new residents-who are responsible for a string of official complaints about illegal construction that does not obviously affect them but offends their sense of legality. "Some people," remarked a butcher who spoke of three newcomers who reported on the illegal construction work on a balcony opposite their apartment, "are turds!" (Certa gente e stronzo!). According to him, all the offender had done was to beautify an already existing structure by displaying flowers on it in a way that did not even obstruct his own view of the Capitol (which he would have considered justifiable grounds for legal action). The owner, a lawyer, was completely unruffled by the charges, presumably because he was confident of his own ability to get the case fixed in his favor or delayed to the point where it would simply run into the ground.
Another case of reporting to the authorities in the same stretch of street evoked much greater complaisance; the proprietors were first warned (which led to what one observer ironically described as "an exchange of compliments", they were causing a nuisance to the neighbors, they were a firm rather than private individuals, and-above all-they were not local. One woman was quite explicit about her attitude: if a well-behaved local parked a car outside her shop she would explain-albeit wearily-that this was a shop entrance, and that would be the end of the matter as far as she was concerned (especially as the police would only impose a fine without actually removing the offending vehicle); but if it was a stranger from outside the district, she would simply report the offense to the authorities and let justice take its course.
The irruption of strangers into the sometimes pleasurably guilty, often conflicted, and predominantly working-class intimacy of Monti society threatens to reinforce bureaucratic interference. Three decades before my fieldwork, an architect and her husband were fined by the city police for illegal parking because hostile locals had reported their offense; but the same hostility led others in the neighborhood to slash their car tires. Once they were incorporated into the local social round, both kinds of harassment ceased; they were now part of the solidary world of a district that deeply distrusted any kind of official interference. Even today, reporting others' offenses is clearly still generally considered uncivil. A self-professed traditionalist argued that this kind of solidarity in the face of authority was the result of a long history of municipal self-reliance throughout Italy-a perhaps disingenuous argument in a city whose inhabitants also invoke the long centuries of papal rule as an explanation of their flexible accommodations to power-and that it "is part of our culture" (fa parte della nostra cultura), derived in generation after generation from the school habits of children who denounce a sneak by chanting, "Spy, spy, great big spy!" (Spia, spia, spione!) Interestingly, he declared that ratting on a neighbor was "pretty uncivil" (nettamente incivile)-a phrase that bears out the persistent sense of opposition between the civil and the civic.
All this gives substance to the hostility that still greets