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That process of oblivion nonetheless continues inexorably. Even the new activists of the Monti Social Network, with its concerns to create a new and viable social environment for the remaining population including the more engaged of its recently arrived members), inadvertently contribute to this process of dememorialization. While its operational style resists the banal formality of the new state order, its helpless documentation of the process of eviction may actually reinforce the power of the property dealers by demonstrating their inexorable invincibility yet again. Its negotiations with the city administration did not recapture the Monti district market for its erstwhile social role but confirmed the greater economic power of the small but dense supermarkets that now monopolize the grocery trade, while its successful campaign to recapture the Angelo Mai school for the neighborhood-now challenged anew by the city authorities-has also created new rifts among its members and raised questions about whose collective ends are at stake.

Gentrification is unquestionably a global phenomenon, sharing with the worldwide celebration of "heritage" the curious irony that local distinctiveness has now become a generic good. At the same time, it is too easy to follow the conventional view of globalization that would represent all instances of a global product as essentially the same. That view is mistaken, if only because local conditions produce a grid of attitudes and expectations that refracts-to use again the metaphor I borrowed from Evans-Pritchard to talk about the localization of forms of worship-the global templates in locally unique and sometimes unexpected realizations.'

In Italy, local identities are intensely and complexly fractured. The dynamics of their mutual engagement nonetheless permits recomposition in occasional effusions of solidarity. Similarly, the very idea of heritage, like the highly localized art restoration schools that vie with each other over the most appropriate forms of historic reconstruction and conservation, glitters in a thousand different glints and hues, with an intensity that belies the universalist claims of the economic ideology driving the entire gentrification process.

That same variety, however, is a source of political weakness. It is virtually impossible, in a land of shifting coalitions and uncertain loyalties, to maintain a solidary front against the invasive force of neoliberal ideology. The Monti Social Network, with its flexible adaptation of local modalities of social interaction and its tough intellectual leadership, is perhaps better equipped than most such enterprises to combat the rapid homogenization of the city. But even this laudable effort is compromised. It cannot confidently claim the support of traditional leftists, who have adopted many of the neoliberals' stances and are further compromised by a widespread perception that their own wealth has undermined their commitment to workers' concerns. Even some devout Catholics increasingly question a church that contributes to the gentrification process. Many residents, too, reject the opportunistic social engagement of the political far Right, seeing it as bound, at the national level, by its dependence for power on a political party-Berlusconi's Forza Italia-that exemplifies, to most Italians, both the entrepreneurial ruthlessness of neoliberalism and the corruption that runs counter to any attempt to install participatory civic values as the ultimate political ideal.

In that situation, with weak and distrusted national political leadership and a city administration that has largely endorsed the anodyne banality of neoliberal management, the more determined agents of the new orderwhether honest business people, church prelates, or underworld crooksmeet only disorganized and disjointed resistance. That resistance can be fierce and protracted, as in the case of the palazzo in Via degli Ibernesi. It can be well-coordinated over a period of time, deploying