Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [6]
This city of saucy impertinence and robust scandal is a national capital, albeit an eccentric one; a study of Roman life should have something to say about the nature of the state and the relationship between the capital and the nation of which it is the symbolic center. Ethnography offers especially persuasive answers, since it provides grounded access to the lives of the citizenry, including those of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and politicians. Rome's peculiar marginality to its own nation-state-like Monti's notoriety within the city-offers a rich opportunity to delve into the dimly illuminated alleys of cultural debate and to peer behind the public stage of monumentality.
Monti: Paradoxes of Poverty
The tales of madams and prostitutes, of houses built illegally and corruption in high places, and of a scabrous language considered to be especially fit for comedy and satire illustrate the heart of the seeming paradox that is Rome: the religion that has made its headquarters in this city defines its flock as unavoidably mired in sinful weaknesses and, by accommodating to those weaknesses and organizing various forms of penance through which the penitent can then seek redemption, both exercises enormous power over the population and provides a model of exploitable compromise that the various secular authorities have often been eager to follow-not least in their organization of urban space.9
Monti, in particular, is quite literally a sunken district-its streets lying several feet below the nineteenth-century thoroughfare of Via Cavour, its houses reproducing-so it is said-the forms of ancient dwellings or shadowing the final stages of all the roads that have forever led to this city of Rome.1° Monti is "below the city" (sub urbe), as the name Subura is sometimes taken to implyl I -today, physically below the busy arteries attesting to Rome's sudden emergence as a busy capital city after 1870, in a stark display of physical as well as moral stratigraphy that has struck professional urbanists and novelists alike. By mid-morning, there is always an air of expectancy in the streets. Even on busy Via Cavour, the nineteenth-century artery that slices through the old quarter, the tingling smell of celeryflavored broth being prepared in one of the many restaurants can still overcome the aggressive fumes emanating from the cars screeching their way down to the Via dei Fori Imperiali. Everywhere there are deep shadows and steep side streets. The noise of traffic racing down Via Cavour and the roar of protest songs and slogans from the huge demonstrations that in the afternoons often snake their way down that broad thoroughfare to the ancient forums and Piazza Venezia seem to work their way in from a chaotic, burning, upper world, seeping into the secretive quiet of Monti's domestic spaces and intimate squares. The traffic that tries to force its way down Via del Boschetto-named for a "little forest" long since displaced by the old palazzi that line the cobblestoned roadway-is a brash intrusion. And when the glowing light of the sunset echoes in the ochers and russets of the facades, their lower reaches are already quite dark, only intermittently illuminated by the gentle light from the studiedly antiquarian electric streetlamps and, on special occasions, from the cupped candles of pilgrims visiting the sacred images that punctuate and accentuate the domestic intimacy of this shy, deep place. Light glows from windows, revealing wooden ceiling beams; briefly glimpsed through street-level doorways, winding, rickety stairs give access to the upper floors.
The depth is historical. It displays, as in a stratified archaeological site, the wild historical and aesthetic profligacy with which Rome has been blessed and cursed. The architect Riccardo d'Aquino invokes a Braudelian sense of the longue duree to suggest that the sense of belonging to a particular