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By Root 607 0

teachers ensure that children will not grow up speaking only dialect and learn quickly to avoid using it outside the intimate family circle, parents will occasionally use formal Italian in speaking to their children as a way of threatening the withdrawal of affection. Among adults, the double-barreled tactic of the formal pronoun and standard Italian is far more effective a barrier than rudeness. A furniture restorer, an amiable man who had been a chemist working for a state agency, decided around the age of fifty to retire and turn his hand to his long-suppressed artisanal passions. To his dismay-which did not prevent him from sending up his tormentors in a hilarious imitation of their hostility-he encountered precisely this form of exclusion; although a native of Rome who had grown up speaking the dialect, he could never persuade the working class artisans of Monti to speak it with him. They responded to his friendly overtures with a wall of formality. While this might superficially have seemed respectful, and certainly gave him no viable grounds for complaint, he experienced it as intentional exclusion. Behind their hostility lay a real sense of grievance, which I also encountered in reactions to another gifted amateur; those who only do this work to amuse themselves, the older artisans imply, can afford or perhaps are compelled by their relative lack of experienced to offer lower prices and so take the bread out of the mouths of those who exclusively live by it. To such inconsiderate competitors a true artisan may deny the expression of intimacy with a sense of righteous indignation.

These exclusionary attitudes remain strong among working-class Romans. Yet there is more-so much more-to Rome. Here one can also encounter the elegant, the famous, and the fabulously rich. Here, too, one can listen to the frequent evocation of the city's historical and cosmopolitan status as the head of the world (caput mundi, revealingly, a Latin phrase recalling ancient imperial glories). It is, moreover, a talking head, a chiac- chierone (chatterbox), as Romans bemusedly acknowledge-so much so that a woman once remarked to another woman whose dachshund had started barking wildly at another dog that obviously he too needed to talk-that he was a chatterbox himself! A disposition to chatter that infects even the dogs is doubtless a great boon for any anthropologist.46 It is also something of an embarrassment for more self-restrained Romans, as when their fellow citizens accost unknown northerners and offer well-crafted orotundities on everything from climate change to the deficiencies of government; this un affected delight in talk also opens up some of the most intimate areas of social life and makes a public spectacle of gossip and social judgment. Romans are, in short, an ethnographer's dream. And Monti offers an intense refraction of this seductive perversity, concentrating within a relatively narrow space artisans, merchants, and intellectuals and politicians.

CHAPTER TWO

Popolo and Population

onti is now undergoing the greatest demographic transformation in its .history. What the various enemies of Rome did not succeed in achieving, neoliberal economics and especially a rampantly speculative housing market, along with a declining birthrate, are now putting into effect. Older Monticiani often remark, with only partial exaggeration, that one no longer sees children on the streets; the restructuring of old palazzi has brought into the zone a considerable number of absentee landlords and small, wealthy families, while there is some evidence to suggest that the declining population actually reflects a deliberate policy of gentrification designed to turn the entire historic center into a preserve for the privileged. What was once a popular (that is, working-classy district (quartiere popolare~ is today noted more for its depopulation (spopolamento~, a process that began with Mussolini's attempts to reorganize the historic center and that is now, ironically, recuperated by a city administration that claims left-wing credentials.