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By Root 491 0

the scion of a well-regarded local family of committed Communists and his wife Loredana was the pro-Alleanza nazionale daughter of a relatively prosperous Sardinian artisan-artist, they had access to a surprising range of political support; but, by iggg, it had become clear that the more they dallied with the neofascists, the more the Left wrinkled its collective nose at their cause. The union lawyer and a prominent leftist city councilor continued to deal with the residents, although sometimes with apparent reluctance. Paolo himself became very irate with the leftists, accusing them of being "parlor pinks" radical-chic). One impassioned leftist activist who sympathized with Paolo told me that in her view the left wing was losing touch with reality; its attitude of ideological purity was not going to solve any social problems, and clearly surrendered much of the initiative to the more scrappy young local politicians of the Far Right.

The case rapidly-if in very uneven fashion-gained the attention of various political actors as well as journalists and, eventually, anthropologists. At the height of the conflict I became actively involved in organizing a press conference held jointly with a group of politicians, and on this occasion, at least, they represented virtually the entire range of significant Italian political parties. Because I also knew Carla Rocchi, an anthropologist, senator, Green Party stalwart, and then junior minister in the center-left coalition government of the time and was able to persuade her, as a neighbor and colleague, to join in this activity, the press conference restored some degree of political balance. But the residents found it hard to shake off their suspicion of the Greens, since it was another prominent party member-and neighbor who lived on the opposite side of the street-who had managed to get the bank to react quickly when the entire facade of the building began to collapse. When he told the residents that their home was uninhabitable, they leaped to the conclusion that he was helping to add to the pressure on them to depart.

Green Party members were nevertheless interested in the case as it represented a human dimension of historic conservation, one of their public concerns. The families still left in the building were in some degree representative of the Roman vernacular culture, in language, food habits, and orientation to authority; and this gave them a degree of cohesion, despite the occasional internal rupture. As one of them said, "We are the last bulwark of a Rome that is no more. Of a people that no longer exists." The evocation of a locally grounded nostalgia exercised a powerful appeal to those who recalled Monti as a village, with all the social texture that this image implies; but there was also a more generic attempt to link the people of the palazzo with the ancient past. One former resident, confronting the lawyer of the bank that was then trying to evict them, bitterly suggested that the tenants were the last of the ancient Romans but that any tourists who came now would find none of them left.

Journalists certainly helped to publicize the case, but they were more interested in the picturesque and the sensational than in pursuing issues of social justice." When the stand-off with the bank became particularly intense and the newspapers suddenly seemed to lose interest, residents also wondered whether some journalists, being under the control of a powerful local magnate who was also a shareholder in the bank, were afraid to write up the case, or had been specifically told not to do so. When I visited another Monti palazzo from which several people were being evicted, the journalists assembled for the occasion were only interested in one or two dramatic cases that would catch their viewers' and readers' immediate interest; their sensationalism was again a source of deep irritation to local activists.

Not that the Via degli Ibernesi residents refused to play the sensationalist game as well; indeed, they had little choice. Among the factors that attracted the attention of