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owned by a church institution, found themselves faced with near-collective eviction with the arrival of the 1998 law. The ecclesiastical proprietors served eviction notices on all the tenants except for a relatively wealthy hotelier who had recently arrived one suspects that he may be been viewed as the advance guard of a new wave of residents) and a group of nuns responsible for the maintenance of a nearby church. Three families held out; one of the other tenants left after experiencing tremendous pressure despite being of a family that had resided in the building since the nineteenth century and the district since the seventeenth. In a bitter letter addressed to the new pope, Benedict XVI, one of the remaining tenants remarked, "I have read the Bible and at no point in it have I read that Christ told His disciples to go and enrich themselves. A hospice is not a hotel for wealthy people." The writer then entreats the pope to prevail on his priests not to put the remaining tenants out on the street.

But it is precisely in disputes over rights to living space that assumptions about cultural quality become significant. It is surely significant that the only tenants allowed to remain in this building were a handful of religious functionaries, who probably had little choice in the matter, and a single wealthy entrepreneur of precisely the kind that the new urban politics seems designed to accommodate. In this sense, the historic center has become a metonym of the larger disdain in which Romans are viewed elsewhere in Italy. Recall that those Lega Nord activists on Lampedusa with their hotel facility made it abundantly clear that no southerners need apply for accommodation there; they were not only expelling southerners from geographically southern territory, but were also refusing to take in even the people of the capital-an especially despised group in cultural terms.

Now the same thing is happening in Rome itself. The poor, with their local dialect and their rough intimacies, are being quite literally put out on the street, replaced by hoteliers and other entrepreneurs with cosmopolitan pretensions and a cultivated sense of national identity. The Church of Rome has become complicit in the expulsion of the Romans; in a real estate equivalent of structural adjustment, the economic as well as the cultural values of the Roman working classes apparently render them unfit to remain in the newly "restructured" historic center. In the next case to be considered, a case that acquired a certain degree of fame during a decade and a half of struggle, we shall see the same institutionalized disdain for a group of people who, like the church tenants just described, invested a great deal of personal effort in maintaining the fabric the proprietor chose to neglect. Their humble efforts, so redolent of their low social status, only made them more of an embarrassment; spatial cleansing was the only solution to the problem they posed to the new urban vision. In the gentrified urban paradise now under construction, working-class Romans who are expelled with their burden of accumulated cultural and economic weaknesses truly need not apply. Unless they radically change their status on both the economic and the cultural fronts, they will not be allowed back in.

Eviction and Evasion: The High Stakes of Time and Place

Throughout this book, occasional shocking hints of eviction have disrupted a surface calm of good humor, a breathtakingly beautifully built environment, and the city's claims to holiness and hospitality. The violence they entail is structural rather than physical. In Monti, a particularly desirable residential district and service area for government and tourism, the violent mass evictions that frequently lead to charges of police abuse in the suburbs are not a viable option. Instead, as elsewhere in the historic center, lengthy legal battles usually end either with the technical vindication of the landlords or with tearful surrender to sheer exhaustion in the face of threats and harassment.

Some of these evictions happen in