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The conflicts that emerge over eviction are primarily over living spaces and economic rights and goals. But they are also, and in parallel fashion, about cultural capital. The new residents are not simply enjoying the benefits of their greater economic power; they are also redefining the significance of the capital, Italian identity, and the future of a past claimed by many groups of people. The global implications of gentrification and the class conflicts that they generate, implications that are certainly replicated in widely differing sites, are filtered through local perceptions and practices in each.4

Rome offers a peculiarly effective magnifying lens for examining these issues, because the global significance of its history comes perpetually into conflict with the parochial loyalties of its residents, and because the current process of gentrification has occurred at a time when the city's housing crisis has become a matter for international concern. Rome was a center of globalization long before the term was ever coined. It is the administrative and spiritual center of the Catholic Church, which, having willingly accepted the mantle of the long-defunct secular empire, has perhaps been the longest-lived and most geographically ramified and then locally refracted global project in human history' This study can serve as a counterweight to both the generalizations of the globalization literature and the exclusivist rantings of Fascism disguised as a defense of local cultural rights. I hope to show that neither stereotype adequately describes or explains the sometimes excruciating complexities of life in one of the most tragically beautiful products of human artifice anywhere in the world-a city dubbed "eternal" where not only the buildings but the very people themselves are being "restructured."

CHAPTER ONE

Sin and the City

othing here is perfect; everything, even failure, is magnificent; and prose must reflect the gnawing putrescence that strangely enhances the city's aging beauty, veining its robust surfaces with splinters and fractures that intimate the fragility and contingency of its social life. Rome, after all, is the capital city of a country that has fought a long and complicated battle with a corruption of which its citizens are not totally, sometimes not even at all, ashamed. Rome is also the capital of a religion that allows its devotees to appeal to the imperfection of original sin not only as an explanation of their venality but also as a pretext for sustaining it-where even popes and cardinals could order musically gorgeous masses, sung by brilliantly robed choirs, to save their souls from the sordid acts that scattered their seed among the city's underworld.

An entire government office works tirelessly to recapture a small fraction of unpaid fines for building violations by offering absolution on a papal model of confession and repentance; perhaps this is why, as one architect remarked as we scanned the whole city from a high rooftop, in the end most of Rome's gloriously riotous accumulation consists of violations of legal building codes. There is a saying in Rome-"What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did" (Quello the non fecero i barbari fecero i Barberinfl-that recalls Pope Urban VIII's and his nephews' despoiling of the Colosseum for the ornamentation of their family palace in 1623 .' A city policeman invoked this historical allusion to criticize Mayor Francesco Rutelli's expropriation of a public garden and palazzo and his destruction of hundred-year-old pine trees in order to construct a reinforced concrete jubilee information booth with money provided by the Volkswagen corporation. Perhaps, too, he intended a sly allusion to the once strongly anticlerical Rutelli's sudden embrace of the Vatican and his cooperation with the papal authorities in the construction of huge new works ostensibly meant to facilitate the celebration of the jubilee of 2000.2 His comment exemplifies the Romans' cynical familiarity with the