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By Root 494 0

place, to this remarkable city, is a product of indirect emotional attachments generated by a specific pattern of relationships between elements of the built environment and the local culture.12 There is a continuous interplay among institutions and individuals, producing continuities as well as ruptures and especially focusing on the play of eternity and evanescence evoked by the pervasive presence of ruins-of fragments of a past made present by their constant incorporation into the living city. The dramatic artificial lighting that is one of the glories of Rome today has precedents in the romantic prints of Piranesi and others, taking advantage of the way light can reveal unsuspected structural features exposed in a suspended state of collapse.13 Rome exists in a state of perpetual tension between monumentality and the sprawling disarray of untended ruins.

That tension reflects the experienced realities of social life as well, the practical challenge of living an ordinary life in a city that is truly the cynosure of the Western world. Time, the teachings of the church remind us, is the source of the imperfections in all human existence; that life is necessarily, and nowhere more than in Rome, a shifting compromise between the lofty ideals enshrined in monumental architecture and scriptural writ on the one hand and the makeshift adjustments necessitated by social life on the other. What gets preserved may not always follow the dictates of the state. Residents of Monti, despite their leftist sympathies, refused to follow the general destruction of Fascist insignia when their own war memorial was in question, because this would have meant desecrating their own deadvictims of Fascist geopolitics, to be sure, but above all else kinsmen and neighbors in a tightly knit community.

A persistently disobedient streak in the self-representation of Romans allows them to experience continuities in the numerous violations of laws that might otherwise fix the city's architectural fabric in a temporal vacuum. The political scientist Filippo Sabetti has addressed the question of why Italy, long the site of apparently dysfunctional administrations at virtually every level, has nevertheless achieved an enviable reputation in many fields of human endeavor, including the economic.14 He especially explores a set of laws relating to the planning of Rome, in which, like other scholars, he identifies a persistent pattern of compromise between theoretical legality and practical necessity, built, as often as not, into the legal provisions themselves." Rome is the capital of this paradoxical country; it is also one of those places where the sometimes outrageous deployment of the resulting ambiguities depends on a remarkable mixture of ironic humor, inventive casuistry, and agile adaptation.

That cheeky vitality, as much as the solidity of the Colosseum or of St. Peter's, is the substance of Rome's capacity to remain recognizable through the centuries. It offers an alternative eternity to those of the grand sweep of ancient history or the eschatology of a power-saturated church-or, rather, it offers a set of eternities, fragmentary snatches of social experience, of a way of life embedded, reworked, and recaptured in the interstices of the city's most imposing structures. True, the ruins have been idealized, by locals as much as by the tourist hordes; but the fast-talking modern centurion impersonators who demand fees for being photographed at the Colosseum, and the impudent spray-paint graffiti announcing that "Rome is pagan," are no less integral to the invocation of history than the most solemnly restored and framed of the ancient temples and baroque churches. The continuing battle against a state whose representatives are themselves implicated in a wide range of scams and schemes is a far richer source of temporal profundity than are the pronouncements of formal historiography.

The paradox of a great city glorying in the mire of its corruption-a metonym of that larger paradox of the perverse Italian nation-state-is etched in brilliant, deep