Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [182]
I accompanied representatives of the tenants to two meetings in the Capitol, where, amidst the imposing ruins of the ancient council chambers and the echoing heraldry of the city's grandly reconstituted history, they tried to find a way through the bureaucratic machinations of the modern state and city. Municipal housing chief Tozzi and city councilor Nicola Galloro, who had special responsibilities for eviction cases, also graciously consented to discuss the issues with me; their comments provided considerable insight into the city government's inability to reach a resolution that would have allowed the tenants to remain close to their beloved streets, monuments, and friends. In particular, they had to work within a legislative framework that had emerged with parliamentary consensus but that could now easily be represented by rightists as, ironically, evidence for the parliamentary leftists' complicity with the interests of big capital.
On 2 February, 2000, the Alleanza nazionale supporters of the tenants, along with several of the women from the palazzo, staged a noisy symbolic eviction of the bank itself at its nearby branch on Via Cavour. It was a propaganda coup for the party; one of its local activists, Federico Mollicone, who was later to play an active role in organizing barricades in front of the palazzo,18 again and again harangued the crowds over a loudhailer, denouncing the bank's social irresponsibility.
Fig. 7. "No to Deportation." (Photo by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld.)
Among those present, Mauro Peloso, a local councilor and relatively moderate Alleanza nazionale party loyalist, argued that it was the banks who were the "legalized usurers" (strozzini legalizzati~. Meanwhile a woman activist who was handing out flyers at the demonstration, evidently a little disconcerted by the obvious embarrassment of some of the passers-by, said to one man that he should "let it go" (lasci stared-that is, not be upset that this was a Alleanza nazionale event, but take the flyer anyway. She also told me that she was not a party member but a "republican," that Italians had a "social conscience," that the Italian state "needed a complete makeover" (e tutto da rifare~, and that one of the local Alleanza nazionale leaders, Fabio Rampelli, who was also deeply implicated in his party's activism on this case, had "a truly local knowledge of the territory"-all elements that, taken together and in conjunction with Peloso's remarks, revealed the splitlevel orientation of the party: defense of the poor against the banks and the church locally, reactionary conservatism nationally.
It is a pragmatism-or opportunism-that disgusts those, at both ends of the political spectrum, who claim to prefer complete ideological transparency. The extreme visibility of the protest, which highlighted the contradictions of the neofascists' approach, thus created problems of image credibility for the tenants. While Paolo, for example, thought that the Alleanza nazionale had helped to increase public knowledge of the bank's perfidy, others were decidedly disconcerted by the party's unabashedly self-serving exploitation of the situation. The embarrassment of so many passers-by dramatized the difficulty of promoting a neofascist entity in a "red" district, a task made no easier by the fact that Loredana's father was just then launching a campaign to restrict immigrants' alleged degradation of a favorite park area. On the other hand, the expected police contingent (forza pubblica) once again failed to materialize the next day, when the next eviction attempt had been scheduled, which suggested that the strong party showing might have achieved some impact.
Mollicone's remarks had a distinctly party-political flavor: "The Bank of Rome, as an institution of the banks that manage the finances of Rome's city administration, is evicting the residents of the Rione Monti. It's the umpteenth demonstration of the Rutelli administration,"