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By Root 531 0

to ignore the Colosseum. A woman who with her husband ran a restaurant nearly opposite our house told me that the ghost of Messalina, the emperor Claudius's flamboyantly promiscuous and politically disloyal wife whose execution he eventually ordered, occasionally roamed the street. Curious passers-by were more interested in learning from this would-be clairvoyant whether it was true that the famous filmmaker Mario Monicelli still dined at their restaurant; indeed he did, she responded-such famous public intellectuals, who occasionally participate in civic affairs, can have no privacy since they, too, have become part of the collective heritage. Monicelli once attended a news conference organized by some local activists in a wine bar to generate more active involvement in the district's future, and although he said very little his presence, along with that of a locally well known journalist and writer, generated much excitement and optimism. When Romano Prodi moved into his Monti apartment, the residence staff showed it off to passing tourists, even though the great man was rarely actually there and used the apartment as a pied-a-terre for those brief occasions when Prodi had to return to his own country and its capital. The fascination of association was apparently enough to draw a thin but persistent stream of curious tourists. ("Poor Prodi!" remarked a British anthropologist who lived nearby at the time.)

Such associations perpetuate the presence of even the more actively famous scions of Monti; the physicist Enrico Fermi's old laboratory is often pointed out as a site of special interest.42 A protracted tussle between the Ministry of the Interior, which wanted to use the building to store old files and claimed to have nowhere else to put them, and a local group of academics who wanted to see the local hero honored nicely illustrates the very different priorities of state bureaucrats and local activists. For the locals, modernity may be more immediately appealing than the ghosts of the ancient past. A restaurateur even tried to persuade me to buy real estate, claiming erroneously) that prices had recently halved in a short while and arguing that the arrival of a good class of residents would help to preserve the local "culture" as represented by Fermi's laboratory.

This fascination with notable personalities somewhat belies the impatience so often expressed with the rich and famous. The Bosio coffee shop and bar boasts of having been the favorite spot for Fermi and his associates, and hands out little slips with a Romanesco poem celebrating the fact that Pope John Paul II, when he was still a seminarian at the nearby Angelicum, used to come by for his regular cup of coffee here: "Stop by to enjoy a cup and a smile / and, if even the Pope goes to taste it, / perhaps it will be the coffee of Paradise!"

But the ancient past does have resonance for locals. The street where we lived ended at the forum, at the massive stone wall Augustus built to contain the fires but also the disreputable people of the Subura. Monti, like the rest of central Rome, is profoundly and at times perplexingly stratigraphic.43 Beneath our feet lay streets created in the ancient past, and paved over with self-consciously traditional diamond-shaped cobblestones (sampietrini, the stones of St. Peter) that cause taxis to rattle and bounce just like the hansom cabs of two centuries earlier.44 A local architect asserted that the older houses on what may be the oldest continuously inhabited street in the world, Via Madonna dei Monti, reproduced the structure of the ancient insulae; while it seems improbable that specific buildings had reproduced the ancient model over several demolitions and fresh constructions, the general principle may be affirmed by the persistence of internal courtyards, external balconies, and workspaces giving onto the street.45

But the district is rich in the echoes of other eras as well. We lived in an apartment in a solid eighteenth-century palazzo acquired by our pious and kindly landlord's grandfather, an engineer of Florentine