Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [172]
The hope of maintaining a decent-if modest-lifestyle had seemed secure to the working-class majority of Monti until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Other segments of the historic center attracted tourism, fashionable shops, and upper-echelon bureaucrats, while Trastevere eventually became something of an American colony. But Monti remained relatively untouched by these changes. Its proximity to major archaeological monuments clearly was more of a liability than an advantage, given the power of the Fine Arts authorities to interfere with any building or reconstruction at the first hint of potential archaeological interest. This held the value of real estate down for much longer than elsewhere in the ancient core of the city. Few residents saw the writing on the wall, and, with the postwar building boom under way in the outlying suburbs, rents in the urban core at first rose slowly. But the illusion of security soon faded and died. Salaried civil servants and established intellectuals as well as artisans and shopkeepers, many of them financially unable to buy the properties in which they lived or move nearby, were caught by the sudden upturn in rents that began in the i98os and soon reached astronomical proportions. Rent gouging is often described as usury (strozzinaccio~ by rural migrants to Rome, since the landlords knew how desperate they were to remain in the big city. At that point, faced with a choice between eviction and exorbitant rents, many fled.
Gentrification and the Last Frontier
Twenty-three, Via degli Ibernesi, is an eighteenth-century palazzo housing ten small units; another fourteen had been deserted and secured under lock and key many years earlier. Its vicissitudes came to symbolize the civil cruelty of the gentrification of Monti: eviction of the oldest and weakest inhabitants, the capitalists' preference for leaving usable apartments empty over accepting lower rents, the inexorable power of the market to define the course of events. The case mirrors many of the features of Roman social and political dynamics: claims to having lived forever (da sempre) in the area; the leftists' failure to protect poorer citizens in the face of the neoliberal onslaught and the opportunism of the self-styled social Right in exploiting the leftists' discomfiture; the powerful symbolism of the jubilee year as a vehicle for expressing and exacerbating hatred of the Vatican and of its role in the city; the play of compromise and the subtle management of time; the strategic invocation of historic memories and associations ranging from the ancient glories to the Jewish presence; the short attention span of journalists, especially those whose local roots made too deep an interest potentially dangerous to them; and the mediating role of municipal and other officials in both offering solace to the besieged tenants and easing them out of their homes.
It thus seems fitting to climax this account with the story of the Via degli Ibernesi conflict. Other struggles, notably that over the Angelo Mai school, which was occupied by squatters who put on theatrical and musical performances in order to raise funds to ensure their survival, were of more obvious significance to the district as a whole. A working group of the Monti Social Network, led by two planner-architects from one of the local university departments, put together a plan that would allow the school to revert to its former functions while also including space for local civic activities. Even on this important issue, however, there were dissenting voices; when the occupiers' activities began to disturb the peace and quiet of the leftist intellectuals who had come to live in