Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [218]
21. See especially Salvatore Settis, "La bellezza rubata e l'archeocondono," La Repubblica, 11 August 2005, p. 16. The original law, no. 947, was promulgated in 1985, and was later subsequently amended mostly to adjust the specific time frames for the procedures involved.
22. Marcelloni 2003, 38-39.
2 3. The parallel is widely expressed among opponents of the practice. See, for example, Santoloci 2002. (The relevant passage is also reproduced in a 2003 version at the Web site of the group Diritto all'Ambiente (http://wwf.na.agoramed.it/ambiente/dossier/ Condoni&sanatorie.pdf. Accessed on 13 May 2008.
24. Lanoue (forthcoming) describes the Vatican's strategy and its political vicissitudes in this framework.
25. See Schneider and Schneider (2003, 18) for an especially well documented account of the effects of this connection; the fact that the condono applies to builders as well as owners shows, once again, how far the convenience of legislators and their friends influences how laws are written. In Rome, charges of collusion between city administration and construction industry are commonplace.
26. Kertzer 1980 and 1986.
27. Bourdieu 1977, 6-7.
28. The official view of time is nicely encapsulated in a booklet titled 11 Tempo E Un Diritto Time is a Right), in which one key contributor wrote, "I am especially pleased to think that the telephone is the instrument in which, during these years, we have invested the most effort. [This is] because not only does it inform and orientate, but above all it exalts the function of listening that, among all the forms of communication, is that to which I give the greatest affection. The punctuality of reply, the waiting time, the tone of the response, a precise content of information or details of a service: all of this, if it works well, is a sort of hospitality offered to each and every individual" (Gremaglia 2005, 6). Consistently with this recasting of a formal device as a social one ("a sort of hospitality"), she then goes on to note that a major concern of administrators is the creation of a sense "of community, of social ties" (6). While residents certainly recognize these civic virtues as ideals they share with the administrators' rhetoric, they are justifiably skeptical about both their own ability to maintain them and the administrators' sincerity in promoting them. This "hospitality" is a simulacrum, not unlike that of the "hospitality industry" rhetoric whereby hotels recast customers as "guests"; it should be considered within the same framework as the festa dei vicini (see p. 198).
29. See Nelken's fine discussion of delay in Italian judicial procedure (2004, 21-24).
30. Nelken (2004, 21) is in part concerned with explaining why countries like Italy are not more responsive to the external pressures of such larger systems as the European courts. While for jurists the concept of "legal culture," like that of "political culture" for political scientists, may be a useful device for liberating themselves from positivistic models, it does produce a compartmentalized vision of how social values affect formal practices. In reality, as my culinary example (see below) is intended to show, and as the discussion of usury should also indicate, such temporal manipulation probably owes at least as much to the encompassing local understanding of time as it does to any tradition internal to the legal profession alone; when Italian cases are appealed in Strasbourg, one should ask whether this move, too, might not be a means of temporizing that uses a wonderful new instrument