Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [17]
I can also see that some of those who are being evicted have good homes awaiting them. I am aware that localist sentiment can be a festering ground for its own forms of racial and religious intolerance, and that one ironic side effect of the intense battles being waged for the spaces of historic Rome is a rising (if not unchallenged) tide of intolerance toward those who are different. Human life is complex, and in Rome the wages of original sin are paid with extraordinarily high rates of moral interest. No one is innocent of the ordinary social ills of jealousy, dishonesty, and trickery.
The story of these transformations is all the more tragic because it is not a sentimental story of cardboard heroes and villains. If I tried to tell it that way, I would be guilty of the sensationalizing "folklorism" that is the bane of the residents' experience of media attention. It will remain a complicated story precisely because not all the officials and entrepreneurs were necessarily evil or callous. Some were deeply conflicted, even hurt, by their own actions-actions from which there was, perhaps, no convenient social form of absolution.
That circumstance deepens the sense of tragedy, giving it the resonance that allows us to recover the powerful human emotions that inform the baroque forms of Roman life and that belie any contention that performance and commitment must be mutually incompatible. I cannot pretend to be dispassionate. I do not accept the argument of one speculator who claimed that by converting the homes of the working classes into bijou apartments he was improving and even perfecting the urban fabric while, he claimed, the overwhelming majority of those evicted "were given economic help in finding a place to live." He acknowledged the psychological damage to those who must leave homes of long standing. Nonetheless, his primary goal was clearly to make a quick profit; the money he arranged to accelerate the tenants' departure was simply part of his overall calculation and investment. Even so, I can recognize the commitment, perhaps even dangerous sincerity, that might motivate such claims of urban improvement,26 just as I can see the strategic calculation that led some defenders of their homes to suggest that they were now the last of the ancient Romans or to accept the support of politicians whose ideologies they despised.
All this inextricable interweaving of interests and attachments makes the tragedy still more profound, its sense of inevitability all the more shocking, and its probable effects all the more likely to last for many decades, perhaps centuries, into the future of this city with its aged marble hands worn, cracked, and stained like so many of the homes and lives now being destroyed-feverishly clutching at the fraying fragments of its tattered and soiled eternity, tearing at the last loose threads in the desperate attempt to remain attached to a social world now vanishing into the deepening gloom and soon to be erased altogether by the pulsing lights and raucous beat of bars and pubs and discos.
The Cadences of a Cultural Preserve
It might seem strange to introduce the ethnographic core of this study with remarks about language instead of the more conventional themes of neighborhood, work, or family. But Romans guard their cultural intimacy through a profession of complexity that holds that their dialect is a "way of life" rather than a speech form alone; and this attitude manifests