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By Root 540 0

fellow leftists, some of whom condemn his actions precisely because they flout their shared principles.) He also claims that when the police do harass him he simply pays up, preferring not to contest the fines even though he could call on powerful friends to intervene. Is this a civic acceptance of police authority or a civil response to what would otherwise, in his words, become "a dispute that never ends"? Or is it, once again, an act of pragmatic compromise, one that fuses the civic and the civil in a strategy that is maximally convenient for him and allows him to ignore the outraged objections of other, more austerely principled leftists? Or, still more practically, are the fines in effect a way of paying for the authorities' studied disregard of his more serious wrongdoings?

Whatever the answer, he does-it is only fair to note-wryly acknowledge a certain incongruity between his cultural and ideological background and his pragmatic acceptance of the corruption of those with official power. With a delicately historical sense of how such coercive complicities arise, he attributes them to the fact that for a century and a half Romans had been forced to "think with the mind of the county squire" ~pensare colla testa del signorotto della contrada) who operated in the murky stretches of power between a cowed peasantry and an autocratic state. Here, as is so often the case, culture provides a useful social etiology not unlike, and perhaps derived from, the casuistic invocation of original sin.

Despite the persistence of relations of reciprocity and collusion patterned in an older civility, the new civic order does make it much harder for police officers to extract substantial favors from merchants and artisans. A city police officer, a regular customer at a certain bar, professed himself satisfied that there were no violations; but then one of his colleagues came by and wrote out a citation (verbale) because, said this worthy, the owners did not have a license to serve cooked vegetables (verdura cotta). One of the waiters, a sophisticated young man who was studying anthropology (and had actually done fieldwork on family systems in Austria!), told the first policeman about this, and the upshot was that the second policeman-who was clearly trying to extort a bribe on the basis of a nonexistent violation (since cooked vegetables are part of the contents of the sandwiches [tramezzini] that these bars often serve)-was suspended from the force.

Traditionalists actually object to the changes in civic administration that have made bribery so much harder. An architect whose studio had originally been a stable for a carriage and horses, and then a garage, had to pay 5o,ooo,ooo lire for permission to change the functions of the property. A few years earlier, he complained, he could have had that amount-which he regarded as truly excessive-halved simply by paying out about 3,000,000 lire in bribes. But today, he sadly mourned, people are more afraid of accepting bribes, especially as some city police officers have been caught and punished. Whenever "they unearth someone in city hall who's 'eating,"' remarked a restaurateur more sympathetic to the political left wing, there is a huge row.

Some indeed still manage to resist the new civic order to their own considerable advantage. One powerful local operator manages, year in and year out, to place his restaurant tables on the street in a way that creates a serious traffic hazard and is in clear and even demonstrative violation of zoning ordinances. No one touches him because, said an irate right-wing former district councilor, he is "protected." The councilor could, he claimed, have even this well-ensconced malefactor punished. But to do so he would have to make a complaint (the famous denuncia again) to four different sources of authority: the mayor, the vigili, the questura (police station), and the prosecutor's office (la procura della Repubblica). Then the city authorities would be able-perhaps even forced-to act. Their best strategy, the councilor thought, would be to ignite the