Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [45]
Tourists with a more independent imagination might have chosen to do without their often rather clumsy ministrations in any case; not far away, for example, visitors can see the unreconstructed, ruined foundations of the original gladiators' training school. The only plastic there is the rubbish thrown away by careless passers-by as they head out of the ice cream shops and pizza parlors. But the false centurions have also been part of Rome's modern scene, along with the graffiti that deface the walls; like the graffiti, they spoke a heavy Roman dialect, appropriately enough for these henchmen of a latter-day minor local potentate.
Other moments evoke a more national sense of the past. I can recall an occasion, right next to the Colosseum, when the brass orchestra of the carabinieri struck up the tune of "Va pensiero," Verdi's famous chorus of the Jewish slaves exiled in Babylon, which became the unofficial second anthem of the Risorgimento state and was recently also claimed by the northerners aiming to establish their own state independently of Rome.49 Listening to the swelling brass chords I found myself reacting with powerful emotion, despite an official presence for which I did not greatly care and an ideology that has been expropriated by unpleasant forces of reaction. But such is the operatic stage: you suspend your most cherished sense of how the world should work, and another reality supervenes for just long enough to afford a glimpse of the strange alchemy whereby what many locals regard as an unworkable state and an unmanageable city have maintained their air of infrangible glory and cohesion.
The sense of permanence that such performances produce is itself temporary, if infinitely repeatable. But the fragmentation is equally unmistakable. At one level it has been recognized as the persistence of "microquarters" by local sociologists charged with returning the rapidly modernizing city to a scale of human interaction that would reclaim social space for ordinary activities. At another, the same expression micro-quartieri~ has, like cultura, become an everyday descriptive term in itself; Romans may be steeped in history, but they are also tireless sociologists. Sociological research, some of it commissioned by the city authorities, has focused heavily on the internal differentiation of small segments of the various administrative districts; the sociologist Lorenzo Bellicini gave the concept of the micro-quarter a more precise and academic definition, but its appeal lies largely in the fact that it does in fact correspond closely to the perceptions and experiences of local residents.S° An electrician friend, after reeling off a list of streets, each with its defining features, explained that just as each segment of Monti had its own character, loan sharks also patrolled specific small localities of the city in ways that reflected the economic and social peculiarities of each.
Of particular interest in his account is his inclusion of Celio, an area that was split off from the Rione Monti by papal decree in the 1921, half a century after a similar act had severed Esquilino from the district ~ 1874. The earlier reduction is still resented; but this, in the relativistic logic of localism, does not stop those who have been forced by eviction to live on the Esquilino side of the new border from resenting the tragedy of their exile. These administrative acts of reorganization could never entirely eradicate the locals' collective