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By Root 654 0

newcomers who make a habit of reporting infractions to the police. It is worth noting that the insulting epithet stronzo ~turd), applied to the neighbor who reported the obstructing flowerbox, then provoked a pun on the similar-sounding strozzino Sloan shark, usurer; literally, strangler), the ultimate incarnation of antisocial behavior. The new arrivals, with their legalistic actions and sometimes snobbish refusal of engagement with established social practices, stretch ordinary relations beyond the generally accepted limits of tolerance. When an irate resident reported that a tenant in his building was placing flowerpots on a beam that was far too slight to bear their weight, the city police told him to call the fire brigade instead-and the latter informed him that they would not act unless the beam began to crack. Their combined indifference seems as much of a rebuke as any leveled by a neighbor. Both the city police and the fire brigade are, after all, intensely local.

Before the arrival of wealthy strangers made formal complaints more frequent, the entire historic center was a palimpsest of collective minor wickedness. Living cheek-by-jowl (la convivenza stretta) means, as I was told, closing one's eyes to neighbors' infractions; there is a sense of almost gleeful complicity-a local cultural intimacy, without which the social life of the city would die and the city administration itself would become totally inundated with petty complaints.

Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration in local accounts of the outsiders' impact, however, it is evident radical change is in the air. Unconstrained by the informal values of the local society, the new strangers are willing to accept the formal legal responsibility for initiating proceedings. This legalism rudely-uncivilly-interrupts the millennia-old pattern of dealing with minor offenses within the local social context. Yet the old values still persist in relations between the authorities and the rest of the citizenry, in part because police officers and other bureaucrats are themselves, if not residents of Monti, at least familiar with its ways and those of the encompassing Italian culture. As I discovered, delays in reporting any suspected illegality can be spectacular in the baroque complexity of their discouragement of substantive action. Once an attempt was made to break into our apartment; when we tried to enter, the door was jammed half-closed. When we looked more closely, we found unmistakable splintering and other marks of jimmying on the door; two coins, evidently unsuccessfully used to lever the door, lay on the floor nearby, along with little fragments of wood from the door.

We called both of the main national police forces, the polizia and the carabinieri. (Later, when I mentioned my difficulties to a poliziotto, he, not realizing that I had done this and expressing the unfriendly rivalry between the two services, said that I should have called the polizia as soon as I failed to get a response from the carabinieri.) I was unable to connect with either service, so I set out in search of a police station of any kind. The first carabinieri station I found, opposite the nearby headquarters of the Bank of Italy, only served the bank itself, but the duty policeman did agree to make a call to the appropriate colleagues and managed to get through; I later found out that he was probably able to succeed where I had failed because he had access to an internal service line.

Eventually, after several hours and a number of additional calls, a single, visibly bored corporal arrived and took down the details from me in order to make out his report. He refused to look at the coins we had found, and scoffed at the idea of taking fingerprints; he also categorically rejected our suggestion that perhaps the burglary attempt was somehow related to an earlier incident in which someone posing as an official had defrauded us of some money: "It's nothing to do with it," he snapped. To my complaints about the slow reaction, he said, "We must be practical," and went on to say that there