Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [46]
CHAPTER FOUR
Refractions of Social Life
cross from the imposing building of the Bank of Italy, and tucked away behind the main road, a small side street contains tiny apartments barely able to accommodate the prostitutes and their furtive customers. Above it runs Via Panisperna, a street made famous by the former laboratory of the physicist Enrico Fermi and his associates. Their laboratory is a modest unit in a complex of notably old houses. Indeed, the houses on this street are all several centuries old; some are beginning to show all too evident signs of imminent collapse. At right angles to Via Panisperna run two parallel roads, both connecting Monti to the busy Via Nazionale above; one is a busy thoroughfare that filters traffic into the nineteenth-century Via Cavour and the ring road around the Colosseum, which is framed by an imposing block of Renaissance ramparts culminating in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, famous above all for housing Michelangelo's Moses. The other street, Via del Boschetto, is a more modest thoroughfare, named for a long-vanished wood but now fronted with small shops and prey to asphyxiating traffic that seems to burst its narrow confines asunder. At many points molded or painted medallions of the Madonna bespeak a popular devotion of many centuries' standing, uniting the disparate segments of this socially and architecturally fragmented district in a shared iconography.
If virtue is represented by the portraits of the Madonna at many street corners, vice, its necessary antithesis in Catholic doctrine and practice, is thus similarly refracted through the same complex built environment. Portraits of the Madonna cluster far more thickly in places of ill repute-and nowhere more than in Monti and the other Roman district with which it is still locked in a tradition of deep and irrevocable rivalry, Trastevere.1 Vice has its own geography, no less than virtue; to this day, for example, different parts of Rome are known for different styles of prostitution, which today are also marked by ethnicity.' As with prostitution, so too with usury, its modalities refracted through the latticework of micro-quarters. Money lending at interest was a problem in ancient times, and it remains so to this day; as one exasperated merchant put it, it is "like 'the world's oldest profession`-and indeed prostitution and usury are often interlinked.
Segmentation and Subsidiarity
This localization of virtue and vice encapsulates a principle of social organization that, perhaps not coincidentally, harmonizes surprisingly well with the administrative doctrine of the Vatican. It does so in two ways. First, there is the pragmatic recognition that social life will always encompass both good and evil, and that it is often far less productive to combat corruption than to engage with it-and that it will always leave a residue: as the proverb has it, "The baker is always dirty with flour." In this regard, clerics are no better than anyone else; their very humanity is defined by weaknesses they share with others, and another Roman saying has a priest admonishing his flock, "Do what I say, not what I do." The Vatican expects its priests to wrestle with their consciences and recognizes that some must inevitably fall prey to the allure of temptation. Within this understanding, a pragmatic reading of the doctrine of original sin, there is plenty of room for creative interpretation and calculated mischief.
The second area of convergence is structural. This is the system of levels of identity whereby each district fractures into smaller units, either because hostilities break up the surface unity or because responsibilities must be delegated so that the community as a whole