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By Root 550 0

officials to connive at the unregistered subcontracting of small companies. This argument, while it resonated with local attitudes and practices (and specifically with the experience of the goldsmiths, who did very nicely because they were paid with ill-gotten cash for making gold ornaments for politicians' and officials' lovers), did not resonate well with the vast majority of citizens who felt themselves marginalized by all the wheeling and dealing in high places. It may have reinforced the growing cynicism that soon overwhelmed the idealism of the anti-corruption drive, souring the brief burst of enthusiasm for a new ethical universe as much at the local as at the national level.24

In Monti, however, local intellectuals and community leaders are now seeking a more optimistic and proactive adaptation of this same realism. Instead of resigning themselves to strategies of compromise and collusion, they try to probe beneath and beyond the superficial assumption that elegant manners and rhetorically smooth performances are the essence of social harmony. They embrace the rough edges of human life as a necessary prelude to civic action, encouraging the expression of dissent and carrying the energies thus generated into blunt but sometimes productive engagements with elected politicians and municipal functionaries. Their rejection of a superficial notion of civility-the assumption that the absence of conflict is the most desirable end of government-gives the lie to the idea that their lives are all beautiful surfaces without depth.25 Above all, their insistence on the importance of incorporating legitimate conflict and embracing the occasional rudeness of fellow citizens is clearly conceived in direct opposition both to the managerial rationalism of audit-culture civics and the repressive courtesies and elegant menace conventionally associated with "southern clientelism."26 In both cases, they elevate a rough pragmatism above a comedy of manners-in the first case a traditionalizing one, in the second a new managerial style.

These local thinkers reject older models of the civilized life in which there was no place for the wild-eyed prophet of gloom or the irritating social misfit; they also reject the arbitrary authority of administrators. At one point an archaeologist with the Fine Arts Inspectorate saw someone who appeared to be a third world immigrant using the top of a Renaissance stairway as a toilet. Instead of calling the police or one of the social service providers, such as the Catholic relief agency, Caritas, she appealed to the director of her service, and together they blocked the passageway-the most direct route from Via Cavour to the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Local residents and shopkeepers were furious. Instead of accepting the inconvenience, as they might previously have done, they organized a petition and collected signatures. One of the organizers, an antiquities dealer, remarked, "It's an example of a civic intervention (un intervento civico)"-something, he added, that was extremely rare in the area, but apparently a harbinger of attitudinal changes in the making.

Association Life

We cannot understand the new forms of civic consciousness without taking the established conceptual templates into account, although it is equally important not to see in them a rigid determination of all future action. The forms of conflict and alliance among the micro-quarters that compose each district also surface in the history of the many associations that, over time, have sought to address local problems-but the fact that such initiatives have existed at all, and that they also probably derive some inspiration from the rotating credit associations operated by artisanal guilds, belies any stereotypical representation of this population as "traditionally" incapable of civic solidarity.

In fact, in addition to the various religious confraternities there have long been numerous associations of various kinds in Monti. Of these, the so-called mutual aid societies (societa di mutuo soccorso), or rotating credit associations,