Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [19]
The paradox of Rome's ambivalent relationship to the country reflects and reinforces the opportunistic play of localism and nationalism among the major political parties. The political Left is increasingly identified with the trappings and logic of nineteenth-century nationalism; former president Ciampi's enthusiasm for the national anthem and for military parades evidently emerged as a counterweight to the histrionics of the Lega Nord and its strange nationalist bedfellows on the political right. These same northern separatists have repeatedly shown their contempt for the capital. Perhaps the most remarkable incident was an attempt to exclude its citizens, as putative southerners, from holidaying in bungalow hotels they had built in an exclusive section of the island of Lampedusa-which happens to be south of Sicily!;0
Romans, in a country whose northern separatists profess to despise the south as an uncivilized backwater (while more recently encouraging the south's own separatist ambitions), do not necessarily reject the southern label. On the contrary, they profess admiration for Neapolitans, claiming that the latter have a more sophisticated humor, better coffee, and a more cosmopolitan outlook on life. And the southern stereotype serves them well as an excuse for those intimate areas of local life in which la bell'arte d'arrangiarsi (the fine art of fixing things) offers the only relief from a cumbersomely inefficient bureaucratic state.31
Romans were nonetheless somewhat bemused when the Lega Nord, in 2000, organized a massive "march on Rome." The symbolism of this event, which recalled the exploits of Mussolini rather than of Garibaldi, did not escape Roman townsfolk, some of whom even expressed sympathy with the marchers-but were careful to point out that the disaffection with which they sympathized concerned Rome as seat of government, not Rome as their beloved home. They were not particularly upset when the marchers burned an Italian flag, and they could sympathize with the graffiti that evoked, right there in the city itself, the charge of "thieving Rome." Their own feelings about the bureaucratic nation-state were not necessarily more positive.
Once Rome acquired capital status in 1871, it immediately became the site of one of history's most extravagant explosions of speculative urbanism. Huge areas were developed, the value of real estate shot up with destructive rapidity, and whole streets were cut through the existing urban fabric to accommodate the rapidly accelerating movement of human and vehicular traffic. Some areas still retained charmingly inappropriate rustic names; Prati"meadows"), for example, became the seat of the Palace of justice, the preferred office zone of the legal profession, and a bourgeois residential quarter. The image of the burini, the bumpkins from the Roman hinterland who, since Unification, have migrated to the city in search of more lucrative work than the countryside can offer, remains a presence drafted into attempts at explaining the uncouth manners of some diamond-in-the-rough citizens.
These are, so to speak, papal pagans-the word paganus, like the English "heathen," meant a rough countryman in ancient times, and the condescension of urban Romans for their country cousins persists to this day. Nor is the link with paganism merely the shadow of a lost past. The unease of the Vatican about the dangers of pagan revival have something to do with this amiably uncouth presence: not only do graffiti proclaim "Rome is pagan"