Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [21]
Bourgeois expressions of distaste for the Roman dialect are almost as common as disclaimers of racism, and similarly represent claims to a national or cosmopolitan identity. Middle-class residents, especially those who are upwardly mobile, actively deny the existence of a distinctive Roman dialect, while also, somewhat inconsistently, affecting delicate horror at its distinctively swooping cadenza, its gleeful scatologies, and its sexually suggestive metaphors. They often resolve that paradox by complaining that modern Roman speech is not the elegant Romanesco of the caustic dialect poet of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, and insist on calling the modern speech romano rather than the more stylish romanesco or the affectionately familiar romanaccio.) Once, when I was dining with a woman furniture restorer, two other women at the next table started talking about how only those who had a very low level of education and did not know correct Italian would speak the dialect. My dinner companion was fairly sure these two were themselves Roman; their attitude is common among the higher bourgeoisie, and especially among the inhabitants of such prosperous and right-wing quarters as Parioli, a district originally created to house high-ranking functionaries of Mussolini's regime.36
Nor is this attitude a prerogative of Roman birth; a graphic designer, originally from Treviso but now living and working in Monti, praised one or two older residents' speech for its charming capacity to conjure up oldtime attitudes, but saw most Roman speech as simply the "fallen" (calata~ idiom of a bourgeoisie made arrogant by the arrival of new prosperity. This postlapsarian imagery, part of a larger discourse about the corruption of pristine tradition, reflects the privileged nostalgia and cultural snobbery of cosmopolitan professionals, many of whom did not grow up in the city but came there in search of prosperity and assumed an aesthetic posture to match their social ambitions 37 The graphic designer's attitude should be contrasted with the comment of a university professor and professional linguist, a left-leaning Monti resident of long standing, who habitually spoke Romanesco with his immediate family and urged me not to forget that "for us, Italian is a second language.i38
Precisely because Romanesco is relatively close to standard Italian, it is more easily dismissed as simply corrupt or incorrect than are the more distinctive dialects of, for example, Friuli and Sicily.39 At best its critics recognize its former literary glory but shake their heads with nostalgic distaste over the corrupt argot into which it has supposedly declined. One Monticiano recounted that his wife, who was from Ferrara province, had seemed to him to speak very musically, but that she had been corrupted into chewing up words just like any Roman. Even highly educated academics and civil servants tend to acquire the local dialect of their place of residence, and Romanesco still exercises a sufficiently powerful influence to achieve that effect.4o
One way of dispelling the embarrassment is to claim that Romanesco is not so much an acceptable speech form as it is a reflection of ignorance and insecurity resulting from decades of papal rule; but that even in its ugliness it is, in some ineffable way, simpatico.4' But that perspective, as ironic as the language to which it is addressed, argues