Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [173]
One good friend of mine, an older woman of considerable local knowledge and political sensibility who had consistently lamented the passing of the true Left, was morally outraged when many of her fellow leftists refused to help the Via degli Ibernesi group on the grounds that these tenants had accepted too much help from neofascists. She had no time for such petty party loyalties. But even she ended up storming out of a Network meeting about the Angelo Mai situation in almost apoplectic rage at the group's unwillingness to countenance firm action against the squatters' unconscionable abuses (as she now saw them) of Monti hospitality; she lived near the school and claimed that the noise of their numerous musical and theatrical activities made it impossible for her to sleep at night. When, in 2006, the police did succeed in removing the squatters, it was in fact some far-right Alleanza nazionale Party activists who felt free to trumpet their own gleeful triumph, arguing that it was they who had achieved the removal of a public nuisance.
The occupation of the Angelo Mai school was of wide local concern. The building is considered one of the landmarks of the neighborhood, a place where many residents were educated, and its impressive approach through a high stone stairway offered one of the best views across to the Capitol. The ability of the Network to mobilize technical expertise as well as political activism around the project of reclaiming it for local, communal use was impressive. The project engaged local attention around a specific place of monumental significance for local people.
By contrast, the more diffuse and protracted complexities of dealing with eviction across the entire area, and indeed throughout Rome, do not so easily sustain collective attention, especially as the media have successfully cultivated an atmosphere in which sensational cases rather than overarching issues and principles take center stage. In this regard, it was precisely the eventual failure of the Via degli Ibernesi group to mobilize a consistent opposition to their forcible removal from a home of several generations' standing that is especially telling. Their story suggests both the power and the limits of the strategic uses of the past, just as it shows how processes of compromise both allow for peaceful resolutions but also ultimately are more likely to serve the interests of the powerful.
It is a story that must therefore be read in the context of larger events taking place throughout Italy. First, the legislation enacted, ironically, by a national government of the center-left coalition in 1998 to protect the rights of proprietors against squatters increased the pressures on local authorities to act against any tenants considered to be outstaying their contractual welcome. Previously, tenants could force proprietors to demonstrate pressing need Hsu richiesta di necessity del proprietario), and the proprietors would still be responsible for condominium fees, maintenance charges, and taxes, and this led numerous proprietors to offer their tenants the option of buying the apartments at reasonable prices. Some did take advantage of this, although it went against established habit. The new legislation changed this pattern forever, since now proprietors had legal means to evict without having to demonstrate that they actually needed the property for their professional or personal survival. For those proprietors whose tenants were still paying artificially low rents, this change certainly brought timely relief; it is also true that not all tenants were genuinely poor or lacking in alternative housing. But in general it was the collective survival of tenant families that now came into question.
Second, this situation, and the failure of successive governments to provide adequate cheap housing for workers throughout the country, produced an emergency that reached a crescendo in the jubilee year and by 2005 was to threaten