Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [18]
Such jokes serve as boundary markers, recalling a time half a century earlier, when relatively few people spoke standard Italian and the local dialect offered one effective means of exclusion. One elderly man insisted that that the Fascist regime actually reinforced Roman localism by insisting that if, for example, you were Sicilian, "you had [to have] a permit from the police station to stay here in Rome" (tu avevi un permesso d'a questura pe' std qui a Roma[-an ironic observation, in view of both Mussolini's strenuous efforts to impose the national standard everywhere and of the speaker's own noticeable shift to dialect forms even in the course of this one sentence.
The dialect also exhibits a nearly impenetrable semantic subtlety when it comes to intimate gossip. "Where are you going?" can be asked in at least four ways, for example: dove vai? is the neutral form in standard Italian (one does hear it from time to time!); ando vai? is old-fashioned dialect for the same thing; 'do vai? is its even more casual variant; and 'ndo vai?, with a leering pause on the initial n, asks the same question with suggestions of trickery, evasiveness, or illicit adventure.27 Going places is not a neutral activity; finding one's way through Romans' social worlds requires a baroque semantic sensitivity.
A Roman friend recounted that he had followed a sign at the main (Termini[ train station, only to find that it led to a dead end. So he turned around and went in the opposite direction-which was in fact correct. He mused that foreign tourists would be confused, not understanding, as he had done, how to deal with such vagrant signage; but when he suggested to an employee that perhaps, for their sake, it should be replaced, the employee retorted that the station staff could hardly be expected to change the signage all the time! Such antic mystification of the ordinary is far from rare, and, like the dialect, sometimes serves to shield the collective intimacies of a capital resentful of the cultural contempt in which the rest of the country holds it.
That curious relationship reflects the persistent incompleteness of the project of Italian nation-building.28 Among European states, Italy is arguably unique in the extent to which it is tormented by powerful separatist movements and torn by conflicting local autonomies in culture and politics. Its longest lived post-World War II government (2001-2006), under Silvio Berlusconi, was a paradoxical coalition of ultra-nationalist rightists and the perhaps even more extreme separatists of the passionately anti-Roman Lega Nord (Northern League).29 Romans themselves express a surprising degree of sympathy for those northern separatists who accuse Rome itself of robbing them-meaning, in this case, that "thieving Rome" (Roma ladrona) is a bureaucratic parasite.
Even Romans concede that their city, home of ministeriali (government employees), allows for too much surveillance by the authorities. They also resent the extent to which such interference has shaped the cultural forms of everyday interaction. A furniture restorer was particularly incensed that police officers would come with warm professions of friendship, only to be subsequently revealed as snoops whose task was to identify and punish the kind of everyday cheating that makes life economically and socially bearable. As a result of this resentment, as well as the inconvenience of playing host to a vast population of bureaucrats and diplomats, there are manyincluding some in surprisingly high places-who would prefer the capital city to be elsewhere. At least two special Roman associations are dedicated to precisely that goal, or at least to reducing the effects of the city's capital