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By Root 669 0

to achieve adequate redistribution, however, coupled with the clear evidence of cooperation between the comune and certain big construction firms, can only create doubts about its real intentions. The church, too, which often sells off properties that it has inherited as bequests from childless or extremely wealthy owners, can make a legally plausible case that the proceeds will support charitable works; again, however, local residents are skeptical, to say the least. One bar proprietor conceded that the church was in the "front line" of charitable activity, but added that whenever its own economic interests were at stake it succumbed to its own self-interest.' Whatever the motives behind these sales, those who stand to profit the most are the large real estate firms that can afford to buy up entire buildings and take on the expense of restructur ing the interiors as modern, luxurious residential units. They are also the architects, in more senses than one, of a major restructuring of social life in Monti, a process in which prices and real estate values rise rapidly and in which, in consequence, the original owners are clearly willing to collude.

These entrepreneurs know full well that the current residents will not surrender easily. They must expect delaying tactics, legal battles, barricades, and the involvement of a wide range of political forces. The officials who have the legal responsibility for enforcing legally confirmed eviction orders are often on good terms with those on whom they must now serve the eviction papers, partly because they have already supplied information that could be used to stave off the inevitable. Politicians on different sides of the ideological spectrum-people who would not be caught dead talking to each other in Parliament-find such complex events a useful venue for exchanging information and ideas; the lawyers for the owners and the tenants must treat each other with respectful familiarity, since failure to do so will damage both their reputations and their social standing.

Resistance to eviction is certainly not new. Most Monti residents have lived in rented properties at least until the 197os. This is perceived to be a matter of culture ~cultura); the rents had been static for so long that many residents were unprepared for the sudden and drastic increases of the 199os. Hitherto, when a proprietor threw tenants out, they simply moved somewhere nearby. A few Monticiani have owned their homes for several generations; others, evicted in the earlier stages of the processes described here, have bought their way back into the neighborhood although rarely if ever back to their original homes). But such cases are comparatively rare.

When struggles between landlords and tenants were purely local, the tenants could count on a certain degree of solidarity; neighbors would join forces with them, blocking the entrances so that the tenants could not leave even had they wished to do so. While such memories doubtless smack of the usual nostalgia for times of greater social cohesion, they also suggest that the landlords were more vulnerable to social pressures than today. In a neighborhood famous for its mixing of people of diverse classes and occupations, and before the exponential rent increases set in, the church was virtually the only proprietor capable of enforcing eviction without incurring severe social penalties.

For its part, the church had little interest in forcing the issue, sinceaside from housing the large numbers of priests who came to Rome for extended periods of training and study-it could not derive from its real estate any substantial benefit beyond the more or less nominal rents it charged to its impecunious tenants. The old houses of Monti held little commercial value at a time when most upwardly mobile Italians sought space and light in relatively distant suburbs, and when the cost of reconstructing a small house in the historic center far outweighed that of building from scratch a substantial, airy home far beyond the Aurelian Walls. During two decades of massive post-World