Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [194]
A meeting was held at the Capitol on 21 March, with the lawyers of both sides present; Galloro represented the city authorities. Nothing happened; the elections precluded any forward motion. The next access was scheduled for 4 May. The lawyer thought that the city authorities might have forgotten or become too absorbed in preparing for the elections. He was awaiting a formal proposal from the city authorities to the new owners; legally, the city can enforce a certain degree of protection for people who are disadvantaged economically or otherwise. It is probably true that the city no longer had at its disposal a sufficient supply of houses to rent; the collapse of the old welfare system is nowhere more apparent than in the sale of municipal property previously used to provide affordable housing. The less indigent tenants, those whose signing of the agreements I had witnessed, were already on their way to new homes, victims of what the lawyer, who was also the lawyer for the club evicted from the Piazzetta, admitted was "an inflamed ~esasperato) free-market ideology."
An agreement was eventually reached and the other tenants also left. The new owner's advertising began to appear on the building-so hastily, in fact, that a reused banner incorrectly announced the sale of shops as well as apartments. Soon the company's agent's booming voice could be heard, full of genial bluster, with potential clients, his temporary office in the building filled with a seductive display of apartment designs and plans. His was a modern, prospering business; there was no time to lose.
Although the evicted tenants all eventually found decent homes, their ability to maintain a sense of community and a collective identity was now in serious doubt. Paolo and Loredana at least had the good fortune to find a residence only a few meters from the Monti border; others had to live further out. Paolo, devout if anticlerical in the past, now became actively involved in parish affairs, his annual participation as a confraternity member in the procession marking the parish festival of the Madonna dei Monti a powerful symbolic link with the place that has never ceased to be the locus of his affections. His attachment now converged with that of the parish priest, for whom, we should recall, attachment to place was an act of deeply sensual devotion. Paolo continues to visit the shrinking community of his friends; but they no longer meet on the main square, from which their club was evicted a few years earlier. His children still go to school nearby, and many of their friends still live in the neighborhood, but it is clear that the old reticulated engagements are weakening and dying even as I write.
Who has come in their place? Certainly there are some powerful affections that still animate life in Monti. A colleague, a political scientist with strong interests in Africa, remarked that he had only been vaguely aware of the social networks that predated his arrival as a resident in the neighborhood a few years earlier. He had thought that my interest in the idea of a Monti community life was "a form of unrequited complaisance" dun compiacimento gratuito). But when his first child was born, he discovered these links in all their specificity-in the public gardens at the presidential palace of the Quirinale, in the kindergarten, and so on-as a response, not so much to a shared sense of romanita, but as "a kind of compensation for the inadequacies of the municipal administration." And the resulting sense of