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Accommodation does not automatically mean that an abject act of surrender to the arrogance of those with power or money is sincere. But shopkeepers, in particular, do abase themselves when the alternative would be economically disastrous. Every social interaction entails some calculation of risk; self-assertion can snatch dignity from the most humiliating encounters, but it may also result in economic disaster, harassment by corrupt officials, or a legal penalty that self-abasement might have averted. This experiential context colors people's sense of eternity itself; no wonder, then, that the late-eighteenth-century inscription accompanying one Madonnella on Via Baccina should offer sinful passers-by the option of reciting a few prayers "with the heart at least contrite" in order to shorten their stay in Purgatoryj57

Fig. 4. Indulgences written in stone: two hundred days off, "also applicable to souls already in Purgatory" (1797). (Photo by Michael Herzfeld.)

The Madonnelle-portraits of the Virgin Mary and sometimes of other holy figures-are the most visible physical reminder of the segmentary fractioning of local identity. Embedded as they were in the ebb and flow of social relations, protected by particular families and subject both to weather conditions and to the whim of proprietors who wished to alter the appearance of their houses, many of the Madonnelle simply disappeared. Shortly before Unification, in 1847, they passed from the old Prefecture of Waters and Streets of the papal administration to the control of the city council, and this began a process of rationalization and monumentalization-as well as a concomitant privatization of devotional practice-that culminated, ironically enough, in a formal exhibition devoted to the shrines and the social marginality that they expressed. One of the responsibilities that thus came into the hands of the municipality was the supervision and prevention of the use of public space ~occupazione del suolo pubblico), a function that today provides the legal and bureaucratic basis for resisting the illicit privatization of sidewalks and squares by restaurateurs and bar owners in their purveying of packaged charm to tourists. One of the most important effects of this administrative shift was, first, to formalize the shrines as part of a public heritage, and then, gradually, to dismember the raucous open-air homage that had previously filled the streets.58 The church has repeatedly attempted to "purify" such popular devotion on religious grounds as well, rejecting its sociability as alien to church writ and dogma. Especially perverse from an ecclesiastical standpoint is the association, in Monti and Trastevere, of the most intense concentrations of Madonnelle anywhere in Rome with an equally prominent reputation for disreputable behavior and petty crime. 59

Everyday sanctity is thus perpetually stained with everyday sins. In this city so engorged with corrupt beauty, piety, like courtesy, draws sustenance from a rich night-soil of cunning and violence. Monti, physically submerged below the bustling nineteenth-century city and overshadowed by the fierce architecture of San Pietro in Vincoli, embodies the delinquent intimacy of the city's daily life. Residents, who in the sixteenth century defied a pope's orders to surrender their most sacred image to the Vatican, later refused to remove these sacred images from the invading troops of the Napoleonic forces in the eighteenth century or from those of the national army at the time of the Risorgimento. Such intense localism perhaps reflects a sense that the poor houses of the neighborhood "hardly defend the inhabitants' intimacy" so that "a space is thus designed in which there is no real break between outside and inside."C0 The habit of dining on the street, each fagottaro contributing a package of food to the sociable scene, similarly brought neighbors together in the space of a conviviality still warmly alive in residents' recollections.

Inevitably,