Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [27]
The few artisans who might instead consider asking their union for loans must demonstrate that, even if they lack personal resources, they can turn to relatives or friends with fixed incomes in case all else fails; in addition to whatever reluctance their potential guarantors may feel about taking on such a risk, the latter must also expect to waste a great deal of time in interminable bureaucratic procedures. And if the indebted artisans default, the law now allows the few banks that do exceptionally underwrite the loans to confiscate their goods in compensation; while in theory a creditor may not confiscate a debtor's means of livelihood, in practice it is the equipment that goes, since most artisans own little else.
Artisans are poorly served by legislation that protects the wages, safety, and health insurance of factory workers. At the same time they are also in ever-increasing competition with factory owners for the loyalty of customers. Although they are categorically protected by the Italian constitution,3 their livelihoods and working styles fare badly in the new economy, a transformation paralleled and deepened by the effects of gentrification. The advent of this hard modernity has also meant devastating changes in patterns of consumption. Artisans, as (appropriately enough a garage mechanic pointed out to me, do not only create objects; they also repair them. Those who produced artifacts for daily living could depend on the owners' desires to keep these objects useful and attractive-useful because replacement was relatively expensive in a tight economy, attractive because their local reputations depended on appearances. But repair is also expensive; this is especially true in an age of planned obsolescence, the principle whereby goods are deliberately produced for short-term use so that replacing them entirely would be significantly cheaper. Even in as delicate an artisanal trade as a goldsmith's or a jeweler's, moreover, artisans cannot easily compete with a large firm's ability to organize repair work on a more efficient and cheaper basis.
Mass production has thereby turned Rome's self-ascription as a "southern" and thus under-industrialized place into a considerable economic burden. At the same time, the idea of artisanship has itself been diluted; a consumerist reading has caused numerous "artisanal" ice cream shops to sprout all over the city, for example, while the prices of hand-made goods have contributed to the recasting of artisanship as a privileged activity patronized exclusively by the rich-a transformation that was only possible for the most skilled and adaptable of artisans.
A further problem arises from what many artisans regard as the overregulation of their working conditions. One rule requires workshops to have ceilings of at least three meters' height, a virtual impossibility in most of the buildings in Monti. Further rules on ventilation and sewage create additional problems in these old houses. Restricted access to motor vehicles, welcomed by a few, was greeted with fear by the majority, who thought that customers would be discouraged from entering and shopping, to say nothing of the difficulties that would be faced by anyone attempting to load or unload goods. Quality controls have added to their woes, forcing on some a precise standardization that sits ill with their professional ethos and reconfigures the civic order, which has ancient and medieval roots, as a pedantic obsession with modernist bureaucratic procedure.
Ironically, however, it was the growing valorization of "historic" properties that dealt perhaps the lowest blow to both the self-esteem