Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [197]
These curious dynamics are also the political and cultural backdrop to the demographic, historical, and cultural changes now occurring in Rome. The widespread view that Rome is culturally southern and that it is little more than an agglomeration of villages (paesi) leaves it vulnerable to economic colonization, while its unquestionable historical importanceand the equal primacy of Monti among the districts of Rome-also make it a tempting target for the acquisitive tastes of "gluttonous" (golosi) consumers. Arguably the most conservative forces affecting the city's fate, the Vatican, can invoke ancient religious claims and principles in support of its own profitable engagement with the neoliberal economy and ideology at the very moment when its leadership inveighs against materialism.
In the same way, while the faded remnants of the old underworld protest that their only role was to protect the defenseless and arrange the restitution of stolen property, the larger moral universe within which they operated-a universe of compromise, prevarication, and bribery and menace packaged as friendship and experienced as a kind of solidarity among the local workingclass population-paved the way, through the structure of fear and complaisance that it nurtured, for the intentionally divisive and intimidating tactics of the new property entrepreneurs. At a local level, intimidation had mostly served to keep would-be molesters of women and indiscriminate petty thieves in line and to ensure that the word of the local bosses was always respected; the complicity that fed on people's certain knowledge of each other's petty infractions and minor sins encouraged an ad hoc ethics that rejected the very possibility of human perfection.
There was fear, to be sure, and some used it malevolently; but overall it was the fear of social ostracism that really mattered. When the stakes were suddenly raised, that fear became instantly more potent and dangerous. Serious bids for the control of central Roman real estate by state, church, and underworld threatened and soon largely obliterated the forms of the old social polity, replacing them with the massive conformity appropriate to a newly essentialized national heritage. Yet many of the idioms of symbolic violence that these forces employed were the familiar idioms of the older order.
Local people, with their unusually detailed and passionate engagement with history, know about such continuities, and invoke them-sometimes stereotypically, sometimes with quite fine-grained analysis-to explain their present predicaments, and to resist the forces that have produced them. They also know about the long-term processes whereby the entrepreneurs have built a secular property empire on the spaces created by bequests to the church. It is probably no coincidence, for example, that one of the leaders of the Via degli Ibernesi group should have been a bibliophile taxi driver-a man, in other words, whose knowledge of the intricate geography of Monti and rich understanding of the city's long history rivaled, albeit in a different key, that of the parish priest. We shall probably never know whether the property in Via degli Ibernesi had really begun its modern career as a bequest to the church; one effect of the repeated transactions over its ownership has been to bury its past. But the generic links are still visible, a source of brooding suspicion that the eventual