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By Root 696 0

was scheduled for exactly two weeks later, with his own to take place considerably later. Technically these dates were computed on the basis of the legal documents pertaining to each lease, but the suspicion prevailed that in reality the authorities were attempting a divide-and-conquer strategy. Yet at this stage the tenants still had one ace up their collective sleeve: the jubilee, which figured prominently in their public pronouncements, was also very much a part of the public discourse about the housing emergency. As a result, appeals had a relatively good chance of succeeding during this period. The representative of the tenants' association planned to appeal the eviction order on a legal nicety: the fact that the first evictee had been paying rent to the bank continuously for the previous eleven months and that the bank had accepted this payment without demur. His strategy was really nothing more than a delaying tactic; as the union was allied to the governing leftist coalition in the national parliament, it seems that it would never take more aggressive action of a kind that might be taken as critical of the government.

But at least the move achieved its more modest goal; nothing happened on any of the tenants' respective deadlines. The woman who faced the first potential eviction, for example, was given until January. Others were again given variable dates. The couple who had expected to leave on 8 November received no extension, but hoped that the bailiff would still give them an extra two weeks in light of the arrangement made with the other tenants; that very brief extension would have forced them out a mere two weeks later. While the tenants expected that these extensions, too, would be stretched further because of the jubilee, they all knew that even an extended respite could still only be temporary.

Yet their range of options was limited. They continued to apply similar tactics all through the following four years. They were convinced that it was not only the bank with which they had to deal. They also saw in their plight the long shadow of Vatican power. Proof was not to be found-a circumstance that itself constituted a presumptive proof in the residents' eyes; the fact that the Bank of Rome had originally been part of another bank, the Cassa di Risparmio, that had in turn been created by the Vatican's Bank of the Holy Spirit, created fertile ground for such speculations. It was easy to see the Bank of Rome's real estate company, known as Cornice, as a "fictitious company" that stood in for the Vatican, and to assume that it was either the church or some wealthy personage for whose benefit the property was now destined. The leaders of the tenants had worked hard to uncover evidence that would trace the banks' ownership back to a bequest to the church. Such a discovery would have strengthened their cause since Italian law does not permit such bequests to be used for purely financial gain. But their efforts were not successful. Cadastral documents provided no insight; there are still debates about exactly how much of the real estate in Rome the Vatican owns outside its own perimeter. A family named Chiassi, Roman subjects of the Papal State who became Italian citizens after Unification, owned and eventually, after 1870, sold the building-possibly in redemption of a debt-to the Cassa di Risparmio. But conclusive proof of direct church involvement was not to be found.

In their desperation, the tenants appealed directly to the church for support, thinking that if they could enlist the sympathies of the highest ecclesiastical authorities they might be able to break the will of the bank. They made no mention of their suspicions about the Vatican's historical involvement in the bank's ownership of the property, but tried instead to appeal to the ecclesiastical leadership's moral authority and to its special mandate in the jubilee year.13 When Loredana called the Vatican, she was told to go to her parish priest. This, her husband bitterly observed, was pure buck-passing ~scaricopallone). When she explained that she