Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [56]
The Premises of Conflict
The complex ways in which the Monti body politic splits and reassembles reflect its ability to adapt to changing political and economic interests. This reversible fractioning, in which we can reasonably see the temporal realization of the Roman capacity for compromise and accommodation, was already a striking feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Monti society. The entire rione united in symbolic opposition to other such segments of old Rome, sometimes in ways that materialized as real violence. Rivalry with Trastevere was especially fierce. Stone-throwing fights ~sassaiuole) and lengthy drunken brawls pitting Monticiani against Trasteverini were celebrated in poetry, prints, and popular memory; it was only when the Napoleonic forces invaded the city that the two neighborhoods forgot their mutual enmity for long enough to pelt the French soldiers together. Violence in homes and streets remained a common occurrence until after World War II; an elderly lady who had grown up in a more genteel district recalled the horror with which she heard loud brawling and threats of mayhem during her first nights in the area. One of my book-collecting taxi driver friends drew my attention to a passage in Stendhal, who described the people of Monti as "terrible people" who matched their rivals in Trastevere murder for murder.32 Within Monti, similar but more localized rivalries often erupted between sections of the area; while some of these rivalries were rather generic between Upper and Lower Monti, for example), others pitted single streets against each other. People took collective names from their localities; the Ciancaleonini, for example, were named after a small side street Via dei Ciancaleoni)-"as if," said one resident of a nearby street, "it was a whole family." jn fact, their sense of collective identity may reflect a common history, since the buildings on this street had been donated by one of the Ciancaleoni family to a confraternity, which was bound by the terms of the bequest to rent to handicapped people at low cost, while the monetary part of the bequest was dedicated to the care of orphans.) Each of these streets asserted its identity through sometimes violent confrontations with the others. But, added the same resident, "If there was any argument with other districts, there was always the coalition"-that is, of a larger group of streets, united in the face of a common rival.
The rivalries among districts of Rome were entirely real, as early-nineteenth-century prints by Bartolomeo Pinelli make clear.33 Today they are more the material of jokes than of actual hostility, though the persistent groaning of one shopkeeper about how she disliked Monti and how badly she missed her native Trastevere although she also admitted that she would not return to live there as it has now been overrun by foreign residents) suggested that a sharp sense of mutual distrust persists even amid all the apparently good-humored banter. Indeed, the banter itself is indicative of the spectacular ease with which hostility and alliance, like vice and virtue, merge and split with the needs of the moment.
The relativity of conflict is a striking example of what anthropologists call "segmentation," which they have usually taken it to be typical of nonEuropean people who lack state-based forms of governance; the absence of a strongly unified sense of the nation-state perhaps accounts for its prominence in Roman life. This social logic, so