Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [220]
9. The most fearsome of these bosses was known as the Eel (Anguilla); a transitional figure, he became heavily involved in drug trafficking. Formal personal names of such characters are rarely mentioned even today for fear of reprisals. It is not clear that these minor bosses have really disappeared, although the one such character I met proclaimed his innocence and insisted that even his brother, a notorious criminal, had been a good man. But this is the public rhetoric of underworlds everywhere.
Io. The mixture of Italian and Romanesco here does seem to suggest that it is the "lazy" forms (note the two infinitives) that persist even when other morphological features of the dialect disappear. But it could simply reflect the fact that someone who normally spoke an educated Italian was trying to imitate the rough speech of the bosses.
11. On the bulli of Rome, see especially Mariani 1983; Rossetti 1979. They area stock character of local dialect comedy; Gigi er Bullo, a play by the Monti writer Ettore Petrolini, is regarded as a particularly good example of this genre, as are the cinematic adventures of the actor Alberto Sordi (made honorary mayor of Rome for a day; see 11 Messaggero, so June 2000, p. 21). The commemorative plaque on Petrolini's house likens his writings to the "talking poems" of Pasquino (on which, see pp. 8, 9, 134); this is a good illustration of the domestication of Roman authenticity by local authorities. A related category is that of the coatto, literally "coerced" or "forced" (as in forced labor(-the man who, having been evicted from his original home (and usually expelled to the rougher suburbs, emphasized his tough-guy status by using a particularly slang-laden version of Romanesco and through forms of violence and rudeness that emphasized both his local power and his marginality to official power. While the association of the coatto with eviction goes back particularly to the Mussolini era and the expulsion of large numbers of Monticiani from the area cleared to make way for the Via dei Fori Imperiali, as well as with the flight to the suburbs in the 196os, it may be gaining new resonance because of the current, catastrophic epidemic of evictions.
12. Giuseppe Scandurra, the anthropologist son of the urban planner Enzo Scandurra, has suggested, in an interesting and thoughtful response to my earliest, most schematic published account of Monti (Herzfeld 2001) that this view of matters may be somewhat romanticized and that it might more accurately be applied to outlying districts with a demonstrably greater underworld presence (Scandurra 2007, 15 1-52). It is a view widely expressed by local residents, however, and I have sought here to show that, even allowing for nostalgic distortion, their idealized model appears to have some basis in social experience. Scandurra's comment nevertheless usefully underscores the risk of reading such recollections too literally or sweepingly.
13. See the recent coverage of the mafia share (roughly 7 percent) of the national economy, in La Repubblica (p. ii), Corriere della Sera (p. 18), and, in the international media, International Herald Tribune (p. 3), all on 23 October 2007.
14. See especially Das and Kleinman 2001, 2 5-26.
15. See Bianconi's account of the Magliana gang (1995), probably the most feared and vicious of all post-World War II underworld groups operating in Rome.
16. The acquisition of social capital by illegal means somewhat undercuts Putnam's idealistic portrayal of the phenomenon as a prerequisite for effective civic transparency ~ 1993, 167-71); as I have tried to show throughout this book, the sharp categorical separation of the civic and legal from notions of civility does not correspond to local concepts.
17. The elderly grandmother was considered to be completely disabled and the daughters were aged 12 and 16, respectively. In such cases, an eviction could have