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These declarations again had little effect. The city administration was clearly caught in an impossible situation, its left-wing credentials threatened by its necessary determination not to end up confronting the bank too directly. It did eventually manage to engage the bank in some highly secret negotiations, however, and finally reached an agreement to fix a comprehensive deadline for 4 October. The bank had every interest in accepting; the government had meanwhile announced that by the end of September no more evictions could be deferred. But the residents had other ideas, and were already talking heatedly about "civil war." When September arrived and there was still no sign that either side would yield, Tozzi, who was sometimes prepared to be more outspoken about his social beliefs than were others in the city administration, declared in a television interview that he would chain himself to the front door if the eviction went ahead. Meanwhile, Mayor Rutelli had decided to run for national office, and the entire city government was in uproar; the former minister of culture, Walter Veltroni, successfully stood as the candidate of the Left.

On the day scheduled for the eviction virtually all the local politicians, including Tozzi, showed up in force; Tozzi was heard speaking on his cell phone to the minister of social services-and the bailiff announced that the eviction had been postponed to 21 November, the date-as it turned outalready set for one of the tenants. The bank's lawyer had himself proposed this date, which ostensibly made the tenants' resistance easier because it finally brought them all into line and allowed them to operate as a single group. The suspicion began to dawn, however, that perhaps this was a rusethat they were all being lulled into a feeling of security because after so many cries of "Wolf!" has one of the tenants wryly put it) they were in fact still living in the palazzo. And indeed, after another unsuccessful attempt by the bank to get the tenants out of the building en masse )on 13 February), the eviction deferrals began to spread out again, with the first group )including the ringleaders) due to go on 20 June and the others in the following month ) I I July).

With the jubilee now well and truly over, the bank must have hoped for a speedy resolution at last, and continued its cat-and-mouse game with the tenants. Rumor began to spread again of a forced eviction, and one resident murmured, "[It's] already pretty strange that they'd leave it to the bailiff to decide [the date]." The seeming complaisance of the perpetually polite lawyer for the bank might just, it seemed, have itself been a ruse. Yet eventually, at the last minute, the eviction was again put off until 3 September. At that point, surmised someone who was facing eventual eviction from another house, there was going to be a tidal wave of evictions, already deferred many times because of the jubilee and the administration's failure to find alternative housing. He thought that the bank, unnoticed amid the general uproar, would then immediately seize the opportunity to pounce.

By the summer of Zoos, the leftist coalition, now in charge of the entire historic center ~a municipio, or subunit of the city administration, following Mayor Rutelli's rearrangement of the entire administrative structure of the comune), seemed more willing to contemplate lending the Via degli Ibernesi group its support, although a junior politician affiliated to the coalition warned me not to raise the residents' hopes too far. The issue had by now acquired far greater public significance; the number of evictees in the historic center was growing, and the skill of the Via degli Ibernesi group in mobilizing public sympathy, however sporadic and compromised by the right-wing nature of their most public support, had made their cause more useful to others. The topic of eviction was now high on the new and more locally focused administration's list of key concerns, and Giuseppe Lobefaro, first president of the first municipio of Rome, actively sought to address