Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [5]
Genealogies of Imperfection
Sin, no less than virtue, has its genealogy-a genealogy that links ordinary men and women with popes and politicians, priests and police officers. And it is a genealogy embedded in the torrent of speech through whose self-consciously working-class, dialect-inflected cadences so many Romans celebrate their ironic skepticism about everything represented by the nationstate of which their city is the grudging capital, much as they lampooned the papacy and its temporal powers through the device of the "talking statue," Pasquino, during those earlier times.' It is certainly relevant to my story that in recent years Pasquino has again begun making acidulous fun of the municipal and national authorities, most often in a saucy rendition of Roman dialect that recalls his baroque versifications. And it was Pasquino who coined the famous phrase about the Barberini that my police acquaintance found so apposite to current affairs.
Romans must come to terms with a corruption so pervasive that perhaps it could only have emerged in an ancient seat of religion and power.4 The Spanish libertine pope Alexander VI (1492-1503 even erected a monument marking the place under its ancient name of Subura; the humorless bureaucrats of the municipality have carefully juxtaposed a street sign reading Piazza della Suburra to show that they, at least, can spell their Latin (and thus have it wrong! ~, and do not use dialect (which uses the same spelling as the Latin! ~-although in another neighborhood some local authority insisted on dialect signage as well. But what these competing monumentalizations conceal is that Subura was the red-light district of ancient Rome, and that it still houses a brothel population, formerly the haunt of military conscripts and even of priests-who, after all, are people of flesh themselves, as one local indulgently remarked, and are thus as corruptible as any.5
These are resilient realities. In 1948, the state tried to close down the bordellos, but some were subdivided into tiny units that could be rented to the prostitutes on an individual basis, allowing them to return to the secretive work and ways of their trade.' When the police recently charged two madams-one aged 79, the other 83-with sexual exploitation, locals were bemused; these revelations hardly came as a surprise.7 Today, however, some right-wing localists profess to hate the fact that the familiar old madams and whores of the "houses of convenience" are increasingly displaced by women from Eastern Europe. Those women of earlier times were "our stuff," said one.
Even the more permanent, architectural features of the district bear witness to intimate secrets.' Alexander VI's monumental marker of the Subura connects a tawdry antiquity (Augustus built a huge wall, still extant, to shield the forum from the district's notorious fires, dirt, and criminals) to more recent imperfections (echoed yet again in the new spray-paint graffiti over the lower half of this monument) in the heart of grandeur and faith. Another good example of spray-paint wisdom, this one in the main square, told the Lazio soccer team to "eat its liver out" with a bitter blend of regret and jealousy when the Roma team triumphed. Graffiti are indeed everywhere, along with neglected garbage dumps; and, while this is not unusual throughout Italy, their presence in Rome often asserts the salty intimacy and lacerating self-criticism associated with the dialect. "Romani monnazzari," (Romans [are] garbage-people) declared one spray-painted dialect inscription, perhaps objecting to the dumping of waste outside the author's house (as a friend of mine speculated), but in a language that made it clear that this generic complaint was for domestic consumption only-a language too coarse, as some Romans insist, for more public use. But Monti has also tried to glorify the same language by linking it to a celebrated folk tradition that is itself a remarkably durable expression of cultural