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many relocated their homes rather than their workspaces. This disaggregated the old economic unit of the casa e bottega (house and shop), a unit that had provided the further advantage of enabling residents to keep a collective eye out for potential intruders, and so cut the artisans off from the unpaid labor of family members.' The ratio of floor space to earnings, along with the advantages of producing small objects when the pace of pedestrianization began to accelerate, favored the goldsmiths. But the very gentrification that is driving other artisans away also means that increasingly the only clients who will appreciate handmade objects-and be willing to buy them at the prices that the artisans must now charge-are living in what were once their own streets; people in the suburbs, I was assured, would not invest in such expensive items. And so all the artisans are, in this sense, condemned to stay in the places from which they are also being driven away.

Some, too, have succumbed to changing views of what constitutes a public nuisance. A carpenter, for example, found himself expelled from his workshop because of the noise his work created, even though the subsequent opening of a pub nearby produced noise of much greater volume (and during the night hours, at that) and even though his old boss continued to work, noisily and in contravention of the new zoning rules now in force, at the same workshop.' A woman who worked for a survey firm, evidently a new arrival in the area, sent an anonymous note complaining about the noise made by some young musicians, but, said their irate father, "she didn't have the courage to sign [it] "-an indication of the social distance between many of the newcomers and the local artisans and merchants.

One restorer who had moved his business into the area and had started off with a workspace attached to his shop soon faced legal challenges to the arrangement and agreed, regretfully, to desist, arguing that laws should be respected. Having hitherto felt that "those who make objects should not be selling them," he now became a merchant himself, specializing in cute manufactured goods of which a basset hound welcome mat seemed representative. In this, he partially followed a pattern already well under way in other areas of the historic center where many artisans succeeded in maintaining their presence only by turning their hands to the sale of antiques and tourist items.

Gentrification thus hurts artisans in at least two different ways: it makes their continuing residence ever more untenable-"restructuring" being, from their perspective, a particularly ironic form of structural violenceand it fails to provide many of them with replacement work in the new conservation economy. While many artisans had belonged to local rotating credit associations at least until the late T98os, these organizations began to disappear, leaving the artisans trapped between the intransigent refusal of banks to offer them loans and the equally intransigent (and sometimes violent insistence of loan sharks on ruinous interest rates.8

Artisans thus had to seek new forms of professional identity if they wanted to remain in their old workplaces. Above all, they needed work that would pay higher and faster dividends. One adaptation was for carpenters to become restorers and repairers rather than producers of original pieces; this work, which is often quieter than building new furniture, could also yield relatively rich economic rewards. One restorer admitted that he could work for just a few hours cleaning a nineteenth-century marble plaque that he had bought for 250,000 lire and then resell it at twice that amount. Some sold off their businesses; but, as a former heating installation mechanic pointed out, the woman potter who took over his premises was not necessarily in better economic shape than he had been. He, at least, had been able to rely on people's practical needs, whereas she would need to establish a much wider network in a notoriously fickle and competitive market.

A garage mechanic compared the secretive