Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [64]
Monti, then, is a space of vibrant social life, rich in the human weaknesses and divisions, the poverty, and the intimacy of a people accustomed to alternating between accommodation to the power of the ecclesiastical state and resistance to its incursions into that intimacy. Their religiosity was similarly both accommodating and fiercely local. Italian self-characterizations may be helpful here; a phrase of Gramsci's about the local forms of Catholic devotion-"the Catholic working class's passive and indolent-rascal ~laz- zaronesca) concept of grace"-echoes in a left-wing shopkeeper-artisan's remark, as he tried to explain the role of banks in perpetuating the practice of usury by refusing loans except to the wealthy and landed, that "Italy is a land of idle rascals ~lazzaroni)!"55 The parallel is surely no coincidence.
Theaters of Piety and Peculation
The intimacy of the street and the theatricality of everyday encounters provides ongoing witness to a powerful mixture of devotion and delinquency. The Monti women of old were notorious for their loud, public fights, which even culminated in a highly dramatic striptease "to embarrass the husband" on one occasion still fondly remembered, and Stendhal noted with some astonishment that Roman women who fancied particular men made no secret of their interest or saw themselves bound to constancy for life;56 this is not Greece or the Middle East, or even a southern Italian village, but a comedic and operatic space for the baring of emotion and physicality clearly framed as performance: "They do it as a kind of theater." Quarreling prostitutes would try to tear each other's hair out. Women who got into especially dramatic screaming matches would contrive to take the whole show down to the Piazza del Tritone, where they calculated that there would be more people to watch the spectacle.
Moments of dramatic female self-assertion still occur, although in a more urbane tone, on a much smaller scale, and usually for less disreputable ends. Nor are they particularly about neighborly relations among women. Women's willingness to speak out, which was also characteristic of the various association and condominium meetings I attended, is often about the assertion of rights and propriety. Once a taxi driver complained volubly because, he claimed, he could not drive past a car parked in a narrow side street. The owner of the car, a woman, came down and declared that there was room for a truck to pass and that she herself would drive his taxi past her carwhich she proceeded to do! Having made her point with great aplomb, however, she clearly thought that discretion-the famous Roman accommodation again-was the greater part of valor, and drove her own car off in search of a more legal parking spot. The taxi driver had threatened to call the police and she did not, she admitted later, want to make a public fool (figuraccia) of herself by having to deal with them. There was satisfaction enough in having put the aggressive male in his place; now she also denied him the pleasure of revenge.
The mixture of exuberance and discretion that we see in this incident displays in an exemplary moment the peculiar calculus of consequence and pride that colors all social transactions in these streets. A woman of non-Roman origin who ran an antique shop noted, with some irritation, that vans would stop at all hours of the day to unload goods, blocking the narrow streets: "These are everyday occurrences, even banal ones ... it's a compromise ... that's what's so hard to take." In such little moments we see the constant reenactment of a model of social interaction that allegedly informed relations with the papal authorities of the past, and that, in a minor key, continues to inform commercial relations in an economic world in which