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which he said was indifferent to its responsibilities toward the citizens in its care and to the importance of historical memory but was evicting long-term and elderly residents for the mere purpose of "the umpteenth building speculation" and of creating a "huge open museum" with banks and shops for tourists. The party, said Mollicone, stood instead for the importance of "continuing a system, an integral memory" (un sistema, una memoria integral, per haps not so unintentionally evoking the language of far-right "integralism," with its appeal to a populist localism that excluded immigrants and critical intellectuals. 19

This position looked distinctly disingenuous from the other end of the political spectrum, given that the 1998 law had been introduced precisely because the right-wing parties had, so Tozzi noted, regarded the previous legal arrangement as "too protective of the tenants and not sufficiently protective of the landlords." Even though both sides had voted for the newer law, however, it was on the left wing's watch that it was enacted, so that the Alleanza nazionale politicians on the street were able to blame the Left for its social consequences.

There was certainly no reticence about the party's identity either in the banners or in Mollicone's speech, and this rightist politician's evocation of social conscience was clearly intended to embarrass the left-leaning city leadership: "The Alleanza nazionale denounces the Rutelli administration's complicity and invites all citizens to boycott the local branch of the Bank of Rome. It is unacceptable that for reasons of speculation and profit elderly people living who have lived for decades on condominial terms [that is, with the special guarantees that condominium residents enjoy] in the Monti district should [now] be sent packing and deported, perhaps to end up in some municipal residence or in one of the outlying suburbs." And once again came the attack on the freezing of the historic center in historical time: "We do not wish for it to be deformed into an open museum." (In a nice irony, an opulent-looking "museum shop," a private enterprise labeled thus in English, formed part of the backdrop to his soapbox oratory. Mollicone took care to attack, not the bank as a whole, but its local branch; a cynic might wonder whether this was a clever ploy to reduce the pressure on the bank while appearing to sustain it. If so, it was doubly devious; for, by focusing his rhetoric on the social aspects of the confrontation, he claimed the moral high ground for his party, then in opposition both locally and nationally. The left-leaning national government had, in De Luca's words, "few means even of an instrumental kind to take action." Leftist politicians and their supporters, thus outflanked on their habitual turf of championing social causes, found themselves with few options other than to show up only when eviction seemed imminent-which at least allowed those with municipal or district constituencies to look actively sympathetic to the elderly and disabled.

Local public opinion was oddly fragmented. The leftist alliance, its increasing inconsistency rather ignominiously exposed, was understandably disturbed by the rightist politicians' visibility, although a few purists, feeling that the leftist parties had foolishly betrayed traditional principles, were prepared to express some cautious sympathy for the tenants' plight. On the other hand, the tenants also discovered that neofascists' support for their cause had some suspicious flaws; one of their erstwhile supporters from the party turned out to be an employee of the very bank that was trying to evict them, while the right-wing coalition's victory in the regional elections of 2000 meant that the new regional administration, too, now had to work closely with the bank, which managed the finances of region and city alike. On the whole, however, leftists saw the struggle as an Alleanza nazionale cause from which they should keep their distance.

The tenants thus did not enjoy complete local support. Critics thought that they