Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [42]
Ironically, it is now the most rightist segment of the parliamentary political spectrum, steeped in a peculiarly Italian version of "social Fascism," that especially objects to the replacement of society (societa) by a museum (museo). As a relatively moderate, locally raised councilor of the rightist Alleanza nazionale (National Alliance) party put it, "it's not right that the historic center should become a museum where only a few people can be allowed to live in the historic center." His anger was doubtless partly directed at a plan to remove Via dei Fori Imperiali, Mussolini's grandiose ceremonial road built at great architectural and human cost across the sites of the ancient forums.40 But the social framing of his objections laid claim to a wider political constituency.
A Passion for the Past
If history is the chronicle of human mortality and the corruption of flesh and soul alike, it is also a source of shared sociability and pride. Its very sinfulness renders it a space of familiarity and indeed of intimacy. Monticiani are deeply engaged in their past; they are proud of living in perhaps the oldest extant red-light district in the world.
I came to develop a close friendship with two taxi drivers-tassinari, a category closely associated with modern Roman identity but now fallen into some disrepute.41 Both were avid collectors of old books about Rome, prepared to resort to many a ruse in their pursuit of knowledge about early editions. One day they plunged into a passionate discussion of the relative merits of different editions of an old book of which one had a facsimile edition. The same man, with an indicative air of self-congratulation for his devious intelligence, sometimes boasted of how he had taken my business card and used it to get past the supercilious librarian at a certain institute that housed the only extant copy he could locate of a seventeenth-century poem about one of the infamous bulli (toughs) of Rome. It mattered to him to check his facsimile copy against the original printing. But it also mattered to him to score points off his friend "the professor"-me-as well as the snooty librarian. He also took great pleasure in instructing me in the literary history of Monti; he was wonderfully generous with both the information he conveyed and the ironic put-downs with which he reminded me that, in Monti at least, he knew a great deal more than I did. Although he is the son of Neapolitan migrants, his passion for history has assured him the status of a true Monticiano-he particularly delights in relating how Monti escaped the general slaughter that followed the sack of Rome in 1527-and his speech is deeply inflected with the local dialect.
Although the conventional wisdom has it that true Romans are those who have been in the city "for seven generations," there is also a widespread perception that few such people actually exist. Even those who grew up in the city's environs and speak a thick Romanesco dialect are often dismissed as mere bumpkins. As an antiques dealer pointed out, however, all residents of the city are surrounded by the inescapable accumulation of history's material remains; and this, he claimed, gave them a sense of security. He himself, a Sardinian by birth and formerly a much-traveled journalist by trade, said he felt neither Sardinian nor Italian but Roman. He had only to peek out of his shop on the nineteenth-century main street and he would see a medieval tower, a paleo-Christian basilica, the edge of the imperial forum, solid bourgeois palazzi from the period immediately following Unification, and, rising high in the background, the Capitol and, beyond it, the antiquarian chariot atop the nineteenth-century Vittorio Emmanuele monument past which runs Mussolini's ceremonial passage through the forums to the Colosseum.
Fig. 3. The Colosseum from Via dei Serpenti. (Photo by Michael Herzfeld.)
The past is inescapable in Rome, and nowhere more so than in Monti; it is hard