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The bank's representatives were nowhere to be seen. At around 1o:3o a.m., after a rather visible series of calls between the local politicians and the police authorities (cell phones figure prominently in such public dramas), Paolo suddenly reported that he had managed to find out that there would, after all, be one eviction that day. He still did not know whose apartment was involved. The young Alleanza nazionale activists immediately hauled barricades into place around the front door, and the shutters of the groundfloor apartments were firmly closed. One of the residents, an older woman, now produced a jug of steaming, sweetened coffee for all those who had come to support the tenants.

After a period of considerable tension the threatened official force appeared-in the shape of a somewhat sheepish single policeman in street clothes, who soon discovered that this eviction, too, was to be postponed. The bailiff appeared and, playing the drama to the hilt, presided over the signing of documents attesting to the postponement. All of us who were present (except the diplomat husband of another anthropologist who happened to live nearby and had also come to watch) were asked to sign as witnesses to this document. Once this was done (and after the son of one of the residents remarked that we should place the videotape I had made of the scene in a time capsule), the tension and the crowd quickly ebbed away. It was by now 12:30 p.m. and people returned to their daily lunchtime routines. Another crisis weathered, the residents resignedly prepared themselves for the next round. As Peloso remarked, one should never relax one's guard, because the bank could easily take advantage of a moment of relative quiet to force the tenants' hand.

A photojournalist who had come to record the scene remarked to me that the entire sequence of negotiated steps was "one of those typically Italian things"-by which he evidently meant the pattern of temporizing and compromise. "It's a way of moving things along under the table, right?" he observed, adding that it "was a way of resolving matters bit by bit." In this he was entirely prescient; the tenants' optimism was to prove shortlived. But he also noted that if a police officer had actually used violence, the only way to file a complaint would be through the testimony of an officer of equivalent rank-which would be all but impossible to obtain. As he rightly implied, the long-term prospects were much grimmer than might have appeared to be the case on that crisp February day.

There were other reasons for concern as well. De Luca may have inadvertently complicated matters with his proposal that the city authorities buy the palazzo and then rent the apartments to the tenants at affordable prices. There was already another proposal on the table: that the authorities simply move the tenants to another of the buildings it owned in the city. Faced with a choice, said one observer whose wife worked for the city's housing bureau, the politicians would probably do nothing at all. Endless discussion of alternatives can be a useful tactic in itself. Moreover, if either proposal ended up being adopted, this would be a precedent-and perhaps a dangerous one from the authorities' perspective, since other evictees would demand comparable treatment.

The other danger lay in a legal variant of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Documents have a long history of symbolic force in Italy, as in so many other countries that have suffered dictatorship; even after the fall of Fascism, the Christian Democrats, in power for two and a half decades after the end of World War II, were notorious for keeping all suspected leftists schedati (filed away). Such experiences invest formal documents with a materiality that may be deceptive; and so it proved in this case. The many signatures to the document signed that day may have carried a measure of moral authority, and Paolo confidently asserted that the politicians had "committed themselves