Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [201]
Until the real estate market started to accelerate, the fragmentation of local society held few substantive consequences for the economic life of the district. Incomes were low and sometimes precarious although usually also adequate for daily living, and trades were humble and practical, suited to a small-scale and face-to-face modality of social interaction. By the same token, however, once the onslaught began, often with its own distinctively heavy-handed strategies for breaking or exploiting laws that residents had merely subverted in a tactical sense,' there was no organized basis for class solidarity or resistance except the political parties-and, especially after the redistribution of the parties in the early i 99os, no one party seemed to stand effectively for the defense of working-class interests. Increasingly wealthy, the traditional leftists became a part of the problem as they moved into houses from which workers and artisans had been evicted. The "social Fascists" remained unpalatable to many, their presence a powerful disincentive to concerted political action in defense of local society; the case of the Via degli Ibernesi evictions illustrates the degree to which their involvement could deter others from joining an emblematic cause against the destructive powers of the new economy.
Nor did old patterns of patronage by the few local aristocrats afford a viable basis for collective action. The very idea of class symbiosis, so frequently invoked as a mark of the old Roman ways, began to seem more laughable than laudable; the new entrepreneurial class had little interest in romantic images of an aristocracy now deemed outmoded and irrelevant, as was the lordly condescension that had been the basis of its mutualist coexistence with the artisanal class. This mutualism was no more of use in the new struggle than the segmentary patterns of street alliances. What had once been a source of flexibility under the Vatican's repressive rule now became sources of weakness in the face of organized economic expropriationexpropriation of space, expropriation of identity, expropriation of the past.
Now more than ever before, the measure of power was money-and here the Vatican, with its proverbial devotion to self-enrichment, was especially well-prepared to adapt to the new conditions. But there were many other contenders as well. While the local malavitosi looked on helplessly as they were evicted from house after house, the new representatives of a far more ramified underworld, nattily suited and rushing hither and thither in their elegant sports cars, poured enormous sums of money into the purchase of entire palazzi and into their restructuring as blocks of tiny but fabulously expensive apartments. The stuttering helplessness of artisans silenced because their working noises disturbed the new residents, the outrageous prices charged by some of the new and even noisier pubs that shattered the night with their raucous music, the banners that first proclaimed "No to Deportation" only to be replaced by others declaring "Apartments for Sale"-these were the marks of a collapsing social world and its rapid erasure from the freshly laundered image of the past.
This, then, is the irony of heritage: too often it entails the destruction of a local society in the name of preservation. The fencing of monumental structures and the eviction of inconvenient residents are both ways of creating taxonomic facts in the very fabric of the city; they are materializations of an ideology that has little tolerance for poverty, eccentricity, or creativity. Nationalism, with its encompassing mythologies and its passion for homogenization and clearly defined categories, paved the way;