Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [193]
Effective timing sealed this endgame. The company that so brusquely rejected the interventions of city and community was, said Paolo, remarkably swift in its demands. After the almost surreptitious acquisition of the property they did nothing for several months; but, when time came to deal with the residents, they gave them virtually no time at all to muster their forces or organize financing. The company had acquired a set of 27 buildings in a single sale from Pirelli; for these, the company had i8 months to pay back a Milanese bank for loans that had made this massive sale possible, while the Bank of Rome-the original owner-still retained some shares in the deal, with 38 percent apparently also remaining in the hands of subgroups of the Pirelli Company. The residents thus first thought that they could fight the takeover on the grounds that the Bank of Rome was still a part owner and that the new owners were therefore still obliged to respect the deal signed with Pirelli.
But it was not to be. Within a year, the residents were again facing the prospect of a forced eviction; the final owner had acquired the build- ing.22 While the Alleanza nazionale activists remained involved at the local level, the electoral victory of the so-called center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi had hardly increased their appetite for a fight that would have pitted their party against the representatives of big business and the banks. The legal grounds for an appeal were weak, since the agreement signed with Pirelli was in no sense binding on any subsequent proprietor under Italian law. The new owners were well connected; and they were in a hurry. After a last, desperate meeting with the city authorities at the Capitol on ii February 2005, on 18 March the first five residents signed documents ceding the property to the new owners. The battle was over.
I was present at the signing of the final surrender. The tenants' lawyer had to explain to them, with some difficulty, that all legal avenues had been exhausted and that the judge's final word must now be respected. The evident anguish of tenants who had lived for decades in the same house contrasted with the businesslike manner of the lawyers, although the tenants' lawyer-a cousin of Paolo's-was visibly agitated. It is hard to do justice to the sense of futility that residents experience in the face of the neoliberal juggernaut and its program of remorseless gentrification.
Marsilio, the Alleanza nazionale councilor, organized a press conference together with one of his party colleagues; the ostensible goal was to pressure the city administration to take responsibility for protecting the few tenants who were not leaving that day, since the departure dates were staggered. Chatting beforehand in a solemn voice, he acknowledged that in a standoff to see who is stronger, wealthy proprietors "win this arm-wrestling" and pointed out that there was little choice but to yield "after fifteen years, aside from the stress, [there's] also the reason of having the public force come every month, of living with this monthly appointment-terrible!" The first five tenants signed the documents one had already left], in which they agreed to move out within a few weeks, relocating to new homes they had found for themselves and, Marsilio claimed, without any official assistance from the authorities.
At the press conference that followed the signing, Marsilio announced that he and his colleagues from the Alleanza nazionale would remain vigilant on behalf of the four remaining families; he accused the city authorities of having been too willing to engage in idle chatter (due chiacchiere, literally, "two chats"],