Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [221]
18. Vismara 2004, 24-26.
19. This phrase, like the ubiquitous "ci penso io" (let me think about that), is redolent of mafia associations; see Boissevain 1974.
20. Male sociality can be very intense. Groups of men often take extra vacations together, leaving their wives and children at home. But the respective social spheres of men and women during the normal working day are not clearly demarcated at all, and women are often vocal participants in bar banter and political activities.
21. These secondary loans are not necessarily offered at exorbitant rates of interest, since they may simply be a way of helping a close friend and making a little extra money on the side-money that is far more likely to materialize if the interest is not too high. One proprietor of an upscale store told me he had bought his shop with a loan obtained in this way from a friend who belonged to a rotating credit association; the interest was 5 percent.
22. The media reports (see City, Rome section, 15 July 2005, p. 18; 11 Messaggero, Rome section, r5 July 2005, p. 37; La Repubblica, Rome section, 15 July 2005, p. VI) confirm in all the key details the operational organization of such scams reported to me several years earlier by informants.
23. One official of an artisans' credit union claimed that there was no such thing as a genuinely poor artisan, and that those who applied for loans-which they did only because they were temporarily short of liquid funds-always turned out to own workshops or even seaside homes; this view, however, conflicts sharply with both the president's assessment and the testimony of the many artisans with whom I discussed their economic problems. It is noteworthy that the artisan-official in question was openly proud of his ability to make huge profits out of restoring objects obtained at very low prices and was also suspected of absconding with some of the funds of another organization to which he belonged. His unusual interpretation thus seems to reflect an implicit justification of his professional practices, especially as he argued that those artisans who failed to accumulate sufficient savings (for example, to buy a house by the sea!) only had themselves to blame. I did nevertheless hear one other local claim that artisans only declared themselves poor in order to prevent their rental costs from rising.
24. See especially the detailed argument in Taghavini 1997.
25. Tagliavini (1997, 171) speaks of "cases in which the bank, even without having lent money at a usurious rate, has nevertheless carried out-intentionally or simply by chance-some infraction, against which the customer rebels and formulates the accusation of usury (even when it is substantially insufficient), which seems both more effective and fashionable."
26. Masciandaro and Porta 1997a.
27. Vismara 2004, 14.
28. Or, as Filotto (1997, 150) puts it: "It [the church] had maintained, on the basis of biblical and patristic tradition, the prohibition of credit and interest; all the same, a certain de facto tolerance was to be found and also the scholastics' teaching, even though it condemned usury as a mortal sin, did permit the use of certain devices that made the extension of credit feasible." He also points out that the ecclesiastical authorities had to come to terms with the reality of heavy debt incurred by certain orders and convents toward the end of the Middle Ages. Ultimately the huge wealth of the church compromised the purity of its opposition to charging interest on loans; its engagement in the temporal world meant that it could not manage without bankers and creditors-and, we might add, the temporal dimension of interest charges made usury inevitable. "So for the church, too, credit and bankers were an unavoidable evil-unavoidable and thus something to be managed, but evil nonetheless and thus also to be condemned and controlled" (Filotto 1997, 15o). The ownership of real estate similarly strained, and still strains, the moral