Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [206]
35. Cole (1997, 131-32) argues that middle-class residents of the Sicilian city of Palermo generally do not express openly racist views against non-European immigrants, whom they employ as markers of their own class position, while their working-class fellow citizens display some empathy toward immigrants from the perspective of their own resentment of Rome and the wealthy north (see also Cole 1997, 112). He rightly argues that describing either group as racist or otherwise is simplistic and misleading. In Rome, the ability to employ the cultural capital (see Bourdieu 1984) of educated speech and urbane civility-in a city largely despised by the rest of the country-disguises an analogous ambiguity, further complicated by distrust of immigrants from the countries of the former Eastern European bloc. The neofascist Alleanza nazionale profits from working-class anger over potential threats to an already precarious economic viability, but former Communists among the working-class population may be relatively unwilling to vote for neofascists. Civil manners do not necessary guarantee civic values; disclaimers of racist intent may be especially useful for disguising it.
36. At the opposite end of the social scale, a working-class friend who had grown up in Puglia (Apulia) was once walking through Piazza di Spagna with a Roman coeval; when they overheard some people speaking the dialect of the area around Bari and Foggia, the Roman was astonished to learn that it was a form of Italian!
37. See Jane Hill's analysis of nostalgia as an expression of power (1992). The "noble savage" view of working-class Romans suffuses nationalist discourse in its treatment of local traditions. Educated residents praised few older speakers of Romanesco for their adherence to traditional speech and values while deploring as "folkloric" those who were more aggressive or disrespectful in manner.
38. Although more self-consciously expressed, as perhaps befits an intellectual and linguist, this observation comes remarkably close to the experiences of peasants from Locorotondo, in Puglia (see Galt 1991, 205).
39. Even passionately left-wing localists sometimes seem embarrassed by their habit of using Romanesco. A good friend who has evidently committed himself to a political career corrected himself twice in a short stretch of conversation (mo to adesso for "now" and annavo to andavo for "I was going"). When I gently remonstrated with him, he replied, "I'm trying to force myself to speak Italian" (Sto cercando di sforzarmi di parlare italiano)-a particularly revealing remark in that, despite his efforts to speak the official language, he implicitly attributes equivalent status to Romanesco and Italian. In Greece, by contrast, people contrast "our dialect" with "correct" or "official" Greek, indicating a very different history of nation building.
40. One of my wife's local Italian teachers initially expressed puzzlement at my interest in a Roman dialect that, for her, did not exist; she conceded the point after discovering in a supermarket that she could not follow the conversation of two obviously very local women!
41. These comments are culled from relatively recent attempts to compile dictionaries of Romanesco: Malizia 1999, 7; Ravaro 1994, 17.
42. Their tendency to argue that Romanesco is incomprehensible to the outsider confirms the impression that in Italy probably, and in Rome certainly, cultural intimacy is more usually defended at the local than at the national level. In Greece, by contrast, it is the national language that people hold to be impenetrable by outsiders, and the dialect of the capital died out within a few decades of Athens's elevation