Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [2]
I write these lines, conscious of my own anger at the failure of imagination that today makes the ancient capital of empire and church the scene of a potentially explosive housing crisis-one of the worst in Italy's history, but a reflection of processes occurring in many parts of the globe today under the pressures of the new international economy. And I look again at what I have written. Out of context, it probably makes little sense. My words describe the debris of ruined lives-the tip of a rubbish heap, like the ancient landfill of broken pots that became the modern working-class quarter of nearby Testaccio. Fragments of the past are everywhere. An elderly Jewish vendor who survived the Nazi dragnet declaimed in staccato bursts that he had counted every one of these stones, his upthrust lower lip and sharp bristly chin pointing to the very heavens in outraged protest. Traces of multiple pasts are piled up in artful disorder, scattered and shattered among the dying homes. They are a lunatic archaeology's scrambled detritus, now promiscuously straddling a prose that can only hope to do justice to the pained beauty of this place through the recitation of its own failures, its own falterings before the layered magnitude of both disaster and triumph.
We are in the heart of old Rome, in Monti, erprimo rione de Roma-the first district ~rione~ of Rome, whether historically or in importance is never clear, and is there really a difference? This is the ancient Subura, red-light district then and now, a marginal place in a capital that for many has itself been marginal to its encompassing nation, a city of bureaucrats and workers despised by other Italians for their allegedly uncultured ways. Monti is luscious with the magnificently stained grandeur of baroque architecture, interspersed with reminders of high antiquity as well as the intrusive, heavyhanded trumpetings of nineteenth-century and fascist grandiloquence. It offered a sensuously attractive context in which to conduct fieldwork; but that same beauty had brought the blight of gentrification. Many residents were welcomingly eager to share their thoughts and knowledge.
Monti, like the whole city, was experiencing a focalization of global connections that would have seemed familiar to its ancient forebears. A German physics student stood in the quiet street where I lived recording a solar eclipse; a Peruvian couple living nearby stopped to watch, and they were joined by two Asian women as well as three local artisans, including a printer and an ironworker who had set up his own makeshift equipment for the same purpose. Such scenes were not unusual. At the end of the street, the owners of a Chinese restaurant-well respected and long established in the neighborhood-exchanged pleasantries with customers in the distinctive cadences of the city. Other immigrants were less popular, and there were some nasty expressions of racism. But those who had mastered the local courtesies won more approval than wealthy Italians who had moved in without showing any interest in their neighbors' lives.
When I first started exploring Monti, a friend who accompanied me on one of my forays, himself a university professor, courteously greeted a familiar-seeming gentleman who turned out to be a former leader of the Italian Communist Party. This man, Giorgio Napolitano, had become the president