Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [31]
Intellectuals and Politicians
If I had followed the prevalent traditions of anthropological writing about Italy, it would have been all too easy to confine the description of the population to the artisans and shopkeepers. A colleague once remarked to me that her friends in Monti did not seem to know of my presence. Yet I did in fact encounter many intellectuals, politicians, and artists, and participated with some of them in the activities of the Monti Social Network. The intellectuals, many of whom treated my importunities with as much generosity as the other residents, may not have encountered me as a daily presence on the streets in the way that many others did, because for the most part they do not engage with quite the same intensity with the artisans and merchants, or for the same reasons, as I habitually did; beyond their own relatively specialized social gatherings, their range of contacts is much more widely extroverted beyond the district and even beyond Rome itself.
Departments of two of Rome's universities provided a considerable academic presence, which perhaps sustained the fairly numerous and wellstocked bookstores in the district. A sign of the new gentrification, however, was the increasing inability of some academics to sustain their residential status; academic salaries could not keep up with the rapid rent increases. Students, too, did not live in the district, but flocked to classes on foot, bicycle, and motorbike, sometimes blocking the narrow streets with their passionate arguments and carefree flirting.
Those intellectuals who tried to establish a business presence in the district, like those who became artisans, encountered some reserve. A former journalist who opened an antiques shop was dismissively informed, "You're a friend of [moderate left-wing mayor Francesco] Rutelli"-meaning, he thought, that he was simply "not one of them." With a foreign business partner who also teaches in a provincial university, and a shop still sufficiently unusual in this district to offer a contrast to those of the restorers and carpenters, he did not fit the mold.
The one powerful and intensifying link between intellectuals on the one hand and established artisans and shopkeepers on the other is urban activism. Some of the intellectuals have pioneered a new grassroots engagement among a hitherto suspicious population. Among those engaged in the Monti Social Network, for example, and indeed one of its foremost protagonists, is a political economist-Riccardo Troisi. Troisi, critical of the crass manifestations and destructive effects of globalization, represents a politically nonviolent position springing from his active engagement with Christian-oriented popular movements. He is very much the peacemaker, disliking conflict whether in condominial meetings or in the Network's activities, where he has sometimes appeared to other members to be too willing to pursue consensus at the expense of hearing out a full range of options; but then he is a practical man, perhaps more so than the thoughtful glassmaker who claimed to enjoy the psychological contrasts that these meetings brought to the fore.
Troisi nevertheless speculated that it might be possible to pursue a form of local revival that would resist what he called the "post-Fordist" globalization of the present age-a community of artisans and intellectuals who would not yield to the economically driven forms of gentrification that have predominated worldwide and who would not accept the museological urban vision of the current administration.