Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [200]
During this period, social change was slow; the center of the capital city remained a marginal place where one heard the despised local dialect more often than the cultivated standard Italian of intellectuals and the emerging new elite. The population was considered uncouth and uncooperative even though the attention of a few filmmakers had already begun to lend it a somewhat romantic cast. In this sense Monti was indeed a paese-not a rural village, but a civil community with its own solidarities and its own conflicts, a persistent incarnation of the civilta that urban living had once meant throughout much of the Italian peninsula. Its life was neither the civic order of the idealized nation-state nor the artificial consensus that so often masquerades as democracy in the new economic order, but a theater of manners and menaces in which a culturally conservative population sustained a strong sense of local belonging if not of collective political interest.
Far from the new civic order associated with the modernities of both Left and Right, the inhabitants instead shared a civil order-an order where rough but polite manners masked constantly shifting interests and alliances. Civil life encapsulates memories of deep injustice and mutual hurt, not as purely moral issues, but as things that happened, and happened repeatedly, not least because the nominal removal of Vatican power did not prevent the church's continuing interference in everyday existence. Not for nothing do Romans say that the Vatican's deity is "not triune but a quatrino"; the casuistic justifications for usury, the cynical paternalism that subjected the Jewish population to isolation and forced conversion while exploiting its status as a way of controlling the forbidden practice of usury and deploying it in the service of the ecclesiastical coffers,6 and the role of churches and confraternities in the accelerating pace of eviction all serve to confirm Romans' conviction that the church represents the corruption of the collective soul more dramatically and more substantively than do any of its flock.
Corruption itself is a process-a process of decay, starting out from the original condition of sinfulness. That model of original sin seems to provide a conceptual explanation for many of the paradoxes that this city instantiates, especially inasmuch as it has long provided the theological justification for economic practices that appeared to disobey divine law. The irony of this all-too-human Eternal City is precisely that nothing is eternal; all is provisional, fixable, negotiable. Indeed, ironically, it is Rome's very claim to eternal and inimitable status that in every era demands anew "a reinsertion of antiquity into a declaredly contemporary system of values."' In such culturally fertile terrain, all can be condoned; here, in thinking of the secular condono, etymology does not betray us as it so often does in the treacherous straits between Italian and English, and we can see that a literally indulgent legal and theological arrangement sustains the contingency and the provisionality of many of the actions necessary to a viable social life. The imperfection of the human condition is such that arrangements must always entail the calculation and manipulation of time. Such, too, is the historicity of social life, of its embedding in experienced realities. Rome instantiates and exaggerates the expulsion from eternal bliss. Its pleasures and its agonies are real and present, and both the flawed morality of the church's agents and the equally common agonies of those of its priests who take their calling seriously are ever-present reminders of that unavoidable imperfection and historicity-as are the temporizing of the rotating credit manager who seeks ways of deferring his trial; as are the calculations of the architect who wants to build illegally