Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [25]
The Artisans
While Monti prides itself on a working-class identity, its stance is not the purist proletarianism of industrial workers in cities such as Turin. It is a distinctly artisanal identity-often loyal to the Left up to a point, to be sure, but nevertheless socially conservative, suspicious of technological change and innovation, and conscious of a long history of coexistence with the upper bourgeoisie and the local aristocracy. Today, moreover, the Left is more visibly represented by intellectuals, party activists, and artists, and local artisans and shopkeepers are often infuriated by the insistence of these newcomers on traffic-free zones and the other appurtenances of gentrification that, they claim, impede their ability to conduct their trades.
The artisans themselves are changing. Ever fewer are those whose work is basic and practical: ironmongers who can fix a lock or a grille, carpenters who will make a new door, plumbers, glaziers, builders. Artisans in this category have an increasingly hard time of it. Not only do their raw materials continue to rise in price, but so do the taxes and social security that they must pay. If they have apprentices, the social security payments become truly ruinous. But most say they cannot afford that expense, and few young people are interested in artisanal work anyway-so artisans resign themselves gloomily to the demise of their profession as they struggle to make ends meet for the last few active years of their own lives. The only exceptions are those who can persuade their own offspring to join them in the work, and such situations are also increasingly rare. Other factors have also worked against the hiring of apprentices. A carpenter no longer needs a junior assistant to make up glue as the work proceeds, for example, since, like many other materials, it can now be bought ready for use. As the national education system provided alternative skills, moreover, young people have generally avoided manual labor. The often secretive atmosphere of artisans' workshops has little appeal: suspicious masters who fear their apprentices' ambitions can generate continual tension, while conditions are cramped and the hours are long.
A few of the humbler artisans still remain in Monti, able to do so only because they belong to the minority who have long owned their own houses or were able to buy their rental properties at affordable prices. The new wave of artisans is decidedly artistic and expensive, and even they face difficulties. A glassworker, for example, must spend considerable sums on raw materials and cannot compete against the commercial power of designer brands even of relatively mass-produced objects. More and more, the shops reproduce the pattern of other former concentrations of artisanal skills; the artisans are restorers rather than creators, or the objects they create are individualized, each piece a unique and expensive work of art. Restoring an art object already belonging to a customer brings little income; but one restorer told me that if instead he bought the object for himself and then restored it, he could sell it at double the original price. Such secondary artisans, some of whom fled to Monti because they could not compete with their upscale colleagues in places like Via Margutta and Via de' Coronari, are now themselves retiring, yielding to even more upscale successors.
Few of the artisans find work with those responsible for "restructuring" the old palazzi as apartment blocks, while the strict control of all such work-at least as regards house exteriors-restricts it to the relatively few artisans who are deemed competent to do it. There is a sense of something closing in on artisanal life-almost literally, since the erection of metal fences (recinti) around some monuments in some parts of the historic center and the designation of limited traffic zones imposes a further grid on the spaces of everyday life. The city administration's plan to gather as many artisans as possible in the old slaughterhouse (Mattatoio) in Testaccio seemed to some to be the