Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [176]
The long confrontation in Via degli Ibernesi began in 1986, when the Bank of Rome sent the remaining residents a letter announcing the termination of their lease (finita locazione). The bank never revealed its motives; residents suspected that some influential personality wanted to buy it in order to create a luxury hotel or some other lucrative venture. Indeed, Paolo at one point said that, had they wished to use it as a school or even as a new bank branch, he would respect their motives; but that if instead they were simply using it as an instrument of financial profit, "for me that's an [act of] infamy." The bank may have been nervous about zoning requirements that would have necessitated a special request to change the use of the building. It also became apparent that one of the bank's preferred methods for dealing with its recalcitrant tenants was to ignore their communications for as long as possible.
And so-silence; each side waited the other out. Then suddenly, in i 990, the bank requested "executive evictions" (sfratti esecutivi), according to a regulation that required them only to wait for three years after giving notice before proceeding to the actual expulsion of tenants. Three years, in the grand scheme of things, was not very long from the bank's perspective, but it gave the residents the time to organize their response and resistance and to come to an agreement-largely maintained thereafter-to work together for their right to remain in the building. The notices of eviction were served separately, doubtless in the hope that the individual families could be persuaded to negotiate independently, or that the differing dates of the projected evictions would make it hard to organize a unified response of any kind.
For a long time the bank had refused to renovate the building. At some point in the mid-199os an employee of Cornice, the bank's real estate arm, told one of the residents, an elderly lady who had dared to complain about the appalling state of the building, "Would you kindly understand that you will have to go away?" The old lady, recalled her son, who also said that they would not have dared to speak thus to a male, "was not one to let herself be intimidated like that," and replied, "As long as I am here, it is my home, okay?" Taken aback by her stormy defiance, the employee backed off hastily and, in a more conciliatory mode, recalled that he, too, had lived in that building and that it was the scene of "my most beautiful memories." And indeed, a couple of years later, the bank began some repairs. These, however, proved both highly irritating and of little value to the residents; indeed, they were a continuation of the bank's pressure tactics. The builders left the interior wall plaster collapsing and ignored the apartments altogether; they had been forced by the tenants' complaints to deal with the mess in the central courtyard, a large space overlooked by the apartment balconies and by now home to a dangerous population of enormous rats; but, in so doing, they retaliated with the nuisance of a great deal of noise and mess while doing nothing to improve the internal living quarters.
Such actions only increased the tenants' resolve to hang tough. In 1994, the bank tried to open negotiations, offering homes in other areas as compensation, along with a cash sweetener. But the residents still refused to cooperate. For them, the scattering of their miniature community to far-flung suburbs would