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By Root 533 0

his newly acquired sphere of influence had been under the protection of a local underworld boss, soon discovered that he lacked the necessary political acumen to manage such a motley crew. One local resident, a surveyor, wanted to close the road off altogether, which provoked a mixture of hilarity and anger from the other members; another resident, an architect, wanted to place plaques with historical information on virtually every building, which struck many as an exercise in megalomania. Bureaucratic procedures (such as finding a willing notary to approve the association's documentation and deal with the city authorities) proved too onerous for this fragile group, the members of which also showed no inclination to pay the dues on which they had previously agreed. "The association died at the moment of its birth" (1'associazione e morta sulla nascita), observed its reluctant president, noting that the jealousy (gelosia) that motivated such associational antics, much like the multiplicity of post-war national governments, could only lead to anarchy. Most local associations have collapsed amid such disagreements.

Their instability reproduces the pattern of national politics. At both levels, instrumental and provisional alliances overcome commonality of principle and long-term planning. "Defending one's own doorway" (difendere it proprio portone) leads local social actors to accept provisional alliances for the pursuit of immediate goals, but ultimately, also in the same way, creates the conditions for fission and disarray as well. People of broadly similar political outlook often make common cause and together seek legal intervention against a specific source of trouble such as noise or pollution. But these acts of solidarity do not outlive the causes they emerged to fight, and indeed, given the delays that beset Italian legal practice, often dissolve before they can achieve their goals. One club created in the early r98os to raise funds to protect poor Monticiani from eviction never really got off the ground; one can easily imagine what role was played by such factors as mutual suspicion, lack of a tradition of collective philanthropy, party-political squabbles, and the desire to be personally and visibly identified with whatever financial sacrifices one made. Some people, especially some of the older artisans, simply distrust collective initiatives on principle. One loner who refuses to join any kind of collective activity sourly asserted that people only joined because of "fear, because there's some friend [mixed up in it[," or because they stood to gain a discount.

Finally, some initiatives fell afoul of the incompatibility between the social needs of their members and the conceptual ambitions of an increasingly neoliberal civic administration. Most dramatically, an attempt to create an artisans' association failed to get off the ground when the municipal officer in charge of labor tried to corral an entire group of artisans in the old district market on Via Baccina. The problem was that the officials wanted the artisans to reproduce the "ancient professions of Rome," regardless of their current activities. "You were expected to do your work in a shop window," recalled a carpenter, marveling at the sheer stupidity of a plan that would have been more appropriate, as he pointed out, to actors than to active artisans with their own existing and specialized trades. The day the authorities called for elections to the association's governing committee, no one showed up, and it died stillborn.

That most of the older formal associations have succumbed to the erosion of daily conflict at the local level does not erase their significance, but exemplifies the forms and dynamics of social relationships in Monti [and more generally throughout Rome). Far from representing failure-as might appear from a managerial perspective-it permits a constant flow of reinvention and dissolution, a pattern that remains both recognizable and predictable because it incorporates the instability of ordinary social relations into productive if