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By Root 534 0

the specialized technical knowledge of the professional and academic segments of the membership. It can even achieve lasting impact on the physical fabric of the district, as the slowly spreading pedestrianization of certain streets suggests. But it can win only those battles that also serve the interests of the new power brokers and economic managers; in this case, for example, concerns over the impact of heavy traffic are shared by many of the newcomers, who imagine themselves living in an idyllically quiet and calm place and are infuriated to discover the level of everyday noise and disruption. Improvements are possible only when larger economic interests are thereby well served-as also when church authorities encourage their tenants to refurbish dilapidated quarters only to take cynical advantage of their pious labor by raising the rents.

Against such forces the small subunits of Roman society, which once protected their intensely local interests through an ethic of minding one's own business, now have few defenses; their history of instrumental compromise, segmentary social organization, and flexible but often evanescent alliances has not nurtured habits of durable solidarity. This is what the Via degli Ibernesi case so depressingly illustrates. The eventual failure of that particular effort illustrates with particular clarity how difficult it is for small and disunited groups to win a war of attrition. The various local societies, most of which were formed to represent the interests of a single street or professional group, prove too evanescent to be genuinely effective; they lose their impetus early in the disgust of the majority at the chatter ~chiacchiere) of the loquacious few and in the frustration that conflicting interests quickly produce.

It is here that the Monti Social Network, with its recognition that real social life entails conflict and that loyalty is not obtained through lofty ideals but through a pragmatic assessment of socially embedded attitudes and needs, has succeeded in outlasting most other such associations; but even in the Network there are those who claim to have no time to waste in idle conversation and others who feel slighted by the priorities that emerge through the overall consensus. And time is rarely on the Network's side. Creating a register of threatened evictions might have been an effective strategy, for example, but, by the time it was put into effect, and despite the creation of links with such national organizations for housing rights as Action, it had little effect beyond, once again, the creation of a surge of hope that was soon crushed by the market juggernaut. The future of the Network is itself increasingly uncertain.

The segmentary structure of Monti, and of Rome, partly explains the remarkable survival of an economically weak artisanal class in the core of this famous capital city until the early z98os and, diminishingly, beyond. Gentrification occurred earlier in other large cities around the world, in some cases by many decades. Rome remained a socially fragmented city without a major industrial base, its commitment to "tradition" and to its monuments undoubtedly serving as its strongest source of economic survival, and with ad hoc economic institutions left forever vulnerable by their technical illegality and by their dependence on the honesty or otherwise of their leaders.

The postwar emergence of an expanded bourgeoisie brought with it a desire for large, airy suburban homes far from the urban core. For two decades or more, the artisanal class was largely left to its own devices, its rents more or less stable and astonishingly low. Those arrangements persisted in part because they afforded owners a steady income in rents, in part because regulation of the architectural patrimonio already meant that visible changes to the physical fabric were controlled and restricted and because these constraints also discouraged further private investment in restoration and renovation. For the city, the maintenance of this remarkable complex of historic domestic architecture