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By Root 549 0

ways of southern artisans, among whom he included the Romans, with the northern trend toward the creation of artisans' cooperatives. The latter, he said, was the only way for artisanship to survive; but he doubted whether Roman artisans would be able to overcome their mutual suspicion quickly enough to be able to save their professional lives. This remark is especially revealing, not only of the "southern" image of the Romans, but also of the tension between intrusive ideals of civic management and older models of civil secrecy.

The Shopkeepers

While some artisans have become shopkeepers, there is an imaginary line that separates the two categories. Merchants, in contrast to artisans, are supposedly right-wing, ingratiating with customers, and determined to provide their children with a prosperous inheritance and social advancement. There seems to have been considerable truth to this division until the r 98os. With gentrification, however, has come a considerable degree of variation in patterns of business. While there is still a plethora of small shops, some of these are innovative ventures, such as herbalists and computer suppliers. One such merchant, a young woman of generically leftist inclination and with a passion for proselytizing about the virtues of the new alternative medicines, was often too busy tending to her customers and focusing on increasing the variety of her products to waste much time in idle conversation. Even owners of more conventional enterprises, some of them relative newcomers to the area, turned out to have relatively progressive political attitudes. And even some older merchants were famous for their left-wing views, if not always for the corresponding business and civic attitudes.

Food suppliers faced an uphill struggle with the arrival of small but efficient supermarkets. Rumors that at least one of these new establishments had underworld connections may have reflected nothing more than local fear of the kind of competition they provided; with the enormous variety of products they could field at any one time, they represented a challenge, not only to the older grocers' economic viability, but to norms of reciprocity. These norms nevertheless remain so strong that even customers with diametrically opposed political ideologies continue buying from the familiar old shops.

It is in these domestic forms of commerce that we see one of the main sources of the accommodation and complaisance that Romans claim as their distinctive social style. Politeness, ostensibly an expression of communal solidarity, works in practice as a key ingredient of genteel competition; a rude response sends customers elsewhere. Showing a lack of interest can be fatal; a clothes merchant said that he would cease to put on a smiling face only for the kind of customer who kept returning but never bought anything-a "ballbreaker" (rompicoglione) with whom, in the end, he has lost all patience. When business is precarious, politeness becomes unctuous to the point of self-abasement. As an exasperated older shopkeeper put it, "Commerce is cowardly" (I1 commercio e vigliacco). And he added, with a meaningful appreciation of the role of gesture in determining social hierarchy: "The good merchant should never look the client in the face [that is, be anything other than demurely polite)." His rhetoric reveals deep currents of anger beneath the face of accommodation: "I must submit to the violent. I must submit to the ill-behaved. I must submit to the clever. I must submit to the ruffian and to the one who is mildly mannered. I must submit to all, both Italians and foreigners."

His voice weary with humiliation, the elderly shopkeeper-no friend either of immigrants or of predatory policemen-articulates the price of living in this society that is the lot of small shopkeepers and artisans. To be sure, his air of resigned humiliation may disguise something more calculating; when a friend of mine bought a single tomato from his shop, the shopkeeper's daughter, whom my friend had known since childhood, calculated the initial weight