• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 723 0

wished to draw the pope's attention to the fact that the bank was about to put ten families out on the street, the response was cold: "The Holy Father does not deal-okay?-with such matters." Finally, again invoking the jubilee with all its implications of generosity and forgiveness, the tenants tried to make a written appeal to the pope himself. They received an unhelpful response from an auxiliary bishop in the offices of the vicariate of Rome to the effect that the church-ever faithful to the rules of subsidiarity-could not intervene, but that the Holy Father would pray for them.14 Outraged, one of the tenants put up a bitterly sarcastic notice that read, "Property of the Bank of Rome-Thanks be to God, now we can rest easy; the Holy Father writes to us that he will praying for us evictees-so much the better." I'

They continued to put pressure on the secular authorities as well. They accosted Mayor Rutelli on a visit he made to the district, his wife's birthplace and an area in which he had himself spent part of his childhood; ironically, however, while Rutelli appeared responsive at the time, the association with Monti of this bourgeois leftist from Parioli might actually have led him to view gentrification as an ideal development, and such a perspective certainly would have been consistent with his overall policies. A housing rights activist described the larger housing emergency in stark terms: that, while the city authorities were not building low-income housing, they were providing financial help for construction on public land "to build houses that would then be sold at high prices, forcing families capable of buying them to pay for mortgages of twenty or thirty years' duration." And so, he pointed out, "the policy of the city government is thus all in the direction of the construction magnates." Such, then, was the policy pursued with increasing visibility by a city administration that had won power on a moderately left-wing platform.16 But this was a pattern of involvement in the construction industry, he said, that went back many years, regardless of whether a particular mayor was of left- or right-wing persuasion or somewhere in between; and he also identified as particular partners in the ownership and profiteering management of the city's "heritage of real estate" (patrimonio immobiliare] both the Vatican and the very bank that was trying to evict its tenants from the palazzo in Via degli Ibernesi.

Undeterred by such ironies, however, the residents subsequently sent Rutelli and his housing chief (assessore alla casa), Stefano Tozzi, a series of reminders of their plight. An Alleanza nazionale city councilor cornered the mayor on the tenants' behalf and demanded action, to which Rutelli replied, "But what can I do? I've written them a letter. And they don't answer." The bank's silence, which was no doubt legally judicious, also gave the beleaguered mayor-whose left-wing credentials were beginning to wear distinctly thin in the media-a partial alibi for his own failure to intervene or to challenge the bank's position in a more proactive way, and an effective cover for his own possible embarrassment at being asked to do something so much at odds with his neoliberal vision for the city. A plan to have the city buy the building from the bank and then provide subventions for those who could not pay the rent, while agreeing on a reasonable rent for the others, did not last long; the bank's asking price was evidently far too high.

Another Green Party senator had by now entered the fray. Athos Dc Luca described the Ibernesi group as "emblematic," a term then adopted more broadly in recognition of the group's internal social diversity. When I first spoke to him about the case he knew few of the details. Initially worried that the inhabitants might turn out to be a group of relatively well-to-do professionals, he was nevertheless soon reassured that they were indeed "this settlement that is such a cross-section [of local society]." Although his response invoked the usual nostalgia for a lost class symbiosis, he also