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By Root 573 0

origin who worked in the Vatican state apparatus, in i 890, two decades after the final incorporation of the city into the national territory. Diagonally opposite crouched a more modest home, perhaps four centuries older. Here a printer preserved an older press that his son was now rendering completely obsolete by switching to computer-based technology, which left him shaking his head in bemused but affectionate wonder; the father deliberately gloried in his Roinanesco speech, peppering it with phrases that underscored his attachment to the dialect, while the son's diction, still slightly inflected with a Roman accent, nevertheless more easily adapted to the national standard language whenever he had to deal with outsiders.

Much as some dialect usage is self-consciously antiquarian,46 attention to objects once discarded as useless has become commonplace. Around the corner from the print shop, a bar still sported the old 1940s-style wooden refrigerator of a previous owner, while in a barber's shop further away a shelf of old cameras still reminds us that tourists and anthropologists are not the only recorders of visual reality, and in the nearby Bosio bar an old coffee-grinding machine, bulky and squat and almost at shoulder height, and fully visible to all comers (which sanitary law forbids for the current equipment), anchors the store in local history at least as solidly as the rather self-conscious framed dialect poems that line the walls. Yet another store, a pharmacy, simply displays its date of foundation (174o); the previous owner, who still visited from time to time, was happy to give me a coffeetable book on the historic shops of Rome, his pharmacy prominent among them.47

Along the street from our house stood the sixteenth-century church and neighboring hostel used to house newly converted Jews dragged from the Ghetto but isolated here so they would not contaminate their fully Christian neighbors; the side-street was triumphantly named Street of the Newly Converted (Via dei Neo fiti ), a name it still bears. Beyond it lay an old printing house, once responsible for producing the paper money of the Bank of Italy but subsequently ruined by scandal. Beyond that imposing structure lies the incongruously Fascist war memorial and the baroque parish church, while, on the opposite sidewalk, a flower vendor plies her trade from a stone slab thought to have been in place for at least the past thousand years.

Huge green garbage dumpsters, often overflowing with decaying refuse, block the main street as one turns down toward the Colosseum; a little higher up, in another side street, a stone inscription one of many to be found throughout the city), dated 1749, threatens fines and other, unspecified punishments for anyone who defied the authority of the "Monsignor President of the Streets" by leaving any kind of refuse there. The problem has not gone away; at one point an irritated resident put up a handwritten sign nearby begging people not to block the doorway: "You ARE REQUESTED TO THROW GARBAGE IN THE DUMPSTERS, NOT BENEATH OTHER PEOPLE'S WINDOWS!!" It was soon torn down, and garbage soon began to reappear.

Monti, it is clear, is embedded in a remarkable longue duree. I hesitate to call it "history." It is too palpably present, immediate, an inhabited reality; and, at the same time, it has an aura of the fabulous because local residents can rarely resist dramatizing its intensity or its duration. I often found myself seduced into the same rhetorical enthusiasm, and still delight in remarking that "our" street had been in more or less continuous use for two millennia.

Residents' historical awareness, profoundly felt though it appears to be, cannot be divorced from the more obviously operatic productions of historicity. Lower Monti ends at the Colosseum, where until recently red-plumed centurions with blunt modern swords wheedled visitors into having them pose for expensive photographs. For years these centurions were tolerated by the authorities despite a law that forbade virtually all commercial activity on archaeological