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By Root 676 0

known to be sympathetic to the immigrants and angry at the discrimination they faced. They accepted; we ordered and then drank our coffee; and, as we were chatting, the policeman entered and glared at us. Having few options, he soon retreated. When the two Albanians had left, I went up to the officer's car and asked to speak with him. He immediately demanded to see my papers. When I asked him why, he replied, not unreasonably, that I had spoken to a representative of the forces of law and order and that he, in turn, had a right to see my documents. My unexpectedly British passport perhaps embarrassed him; he denied that he had issued such illegal orders to the Albanians, but claimed that their papers had not been in order. He seemed worried about my inquisitive questioning, perhaps fearing possible fallout. Officials may use fear, but, in a hierarchy of command, they can also experience it. In fact, a relatively charitable interpretation of the officer's actions suggested by one resident was that he was simply trying to save these Albanians-who indeed may not have been carrying the requisite documentation-from irascible locals, who would have demanded that the officer arrest them right away.

Forbidding these immigrants to enter the square would have no basis in legality; but it does reflect a convergence of local ideas about spatiality with the larger ideological mapping of national territory by local rightists. In this, it recalls a much earlier topography of local prejudice, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the convergence between carnivalesque humiliation of the Jews and their explicit debarment from approaching the area in which their erstwhile coreligionists and now newly converted Christians were housed. While the ostensible reason for this prohibition was to prevent the neophyte Christians (neofiti) from reverting to their old religion, the church's policy of surrounding them with a particularly hostile and notoriously violent population-especially when read in the still larger topography that opposed the reclusion of the Ghetto to the new confinement in "enemy" territory, as the historian Marina Caffiero has argued-was also a way of incorporating the Rione Monti in the larger topography of papal authority.' Such assertions of territorial exclusivity persist to this day, although the actors and categories are different.

To be fair, police officers are subject to severe legal constraints on action, and often question the legitimacy of a system that so severely ties their hands. When I asked one waiter why the police did nothing more, he cynically replied, "They don't want to!" (Nun vojono!) Whenever a police car arrived on the square, all those immigrants with irregular papers would retreat slowly and in very orderly fashion, with quick backward glances but only occasional indications of real haste, to gather nearby in solemn, slightly nervous little groups in the side streets, from which they scanned the square with worried eyes. Occasionally the officers would question or arrest one or two people, but in general they ignored the mildly panicky crowds, which then drifted back into the square as soon as the police car began to drive away. I had the distinct impression that the panic, such as it was, was also a performance-a satisfactory show of terror that was also an act of complicity, allowing the officers to look as though they were doing their job without actually arresting too many people. The police prefer to avoid individual confrontations with people who might in fact be able to argue for their rights. Such confrontations, as a local academic remarked, would reduce their authority (autorita); hence, presumably, the policeman's considerable discomfiture over my intervention with the two Albanians.

Once the police showed up because the local club wanted the immigrants cleared out so that they could begin setting up for their October festivities. When the police appeared the large crowd moved away rapidly and, with a derisive hoot, one of the most overtly anti-immigrant club members