Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [155]
One observer suggested that this moral configuration was an outcome of the huge and more or less continual migration of southerners into the city; with their rural connections still active, they have cheeses and hams to provide-as bribes, he hinted; another man told me of a policeman who was caught, not in Rome, because he had accumulated an enormous number of hams in his home. Those who are on the take are called gluttons ~magnaccia)-a peculiarly apt term in this case.10 Clientelist relations in the countryside, even in the northern areas, were once secured by the ritualistic offering of such goods to the local notables in exchange for their protection, and it is not hard to see how a poorly paid civic authority might comfortably have eased its way into the social template created by this precedent." Indeed, the idea of a gift given with particular courtesy to a superior is conveyed in the term omaggio ~homage),12 sometimes used for the small bribe used to keep rapacious city police at bay.
The introduction of new efficiencies is steadily undermining these symbiotic arrangements. A respected left-wing intellectual, an idealist advocate of respect for the centralized state, expressed enormous annoyance about the new system of electronic surveillance that would automatically fine those who brought cars illegally into the area during certain periods of the day. His irritation was not about the violation of la privacy, now a hot-button issue, but at the fact that he could no longer explain to the policeman who came to write a ticket that, for example, he had brought his girlfriend home in his own car since he could hardly have offered to pay for the taxi she would now have had to take in order to enter the zone at all. He did not specifically mention the possibility of a small bribe or gift, but some such consideration would not usually be misconstrued.
Human engagement is the positive side of these informal arrangements. For some residents, however, the sheer extortion that sometimes plagues even the simplest aspects of daily living justifies any measures the authorities can take against these practices. The city police, responsible for enforcing local and municipal regulations, have the easiest opportunities. They fine those who are illegally parked, check on the hygiene and accounting of local shops, and report infractions of building and historic conservation rules. They seem to have a seasonal rhythm; one woman claimed that in the summer they were on vacation but started "sprouting like mushrooms" once September arrived, ready to pounce at the first sign of an illegally parked car-although a pizza baker remarked that they disappeared with the rain, adding, sourly, "That's the Italians for you!" One could read this last remark literally, as a comment on the difficulty of getting people to take law enforcement seriously; or perhaps one could see in it a recognition, ironic as it may be, of the convenience of having police officers who were only intermittently attentive to their duties.
Their alleged venality, of which I heard many accounts, is couched in an idiom of informal friendliness that closely resembles that of the underworld. Because at a literal level the law provides severe penalties for corruption and has applied them with growing regularity since the state-sanctioned anticorruption operations of the early 199os), vigili cannot demand bribes outright. So they turn, instead and predictably, to the