Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [71]
The local Alleanza nazionale activists are quick to exploit the resulting disaffection and resentment. The connection between the Vatican and immigration is the subject of a writhingly active conspiracy theory: that the Vatican, particularly under the Polish pope John Paul II, in addition to urging tolerance for the immigrants, has actively encouraged them to migrate from eastern Europe and must therefore bear a significant share of the blame for the heightened level of petty crime. Since one part of the party's base is a strongly Catholic bourgeoisie, its leadership promotes good relations with the Vatican at the official level; not so its local chapter, which increasingly benefits from an anticlerical attitude once much more typical of the Communists whose constituency the neofascists are trying to capture. In this, the neofascist Alleanza nazionale reversed expectations, much as did the leftist coalition that controlled city hall, but in the opposite direction: the leftists, under Rutelli, had begun to make very warm overtures to the Vatican, and shared with the Vatican an interest in converting the entire historic center into a depopulated area of museums, residences for the wealthy, and lucrative service industries. Together, the secular and ecclesiastical authorities were prepared to sacrifice archaeological treasures to cement their oddly convenient alliance.73 Some of the most sophisticated residents are convinced that city hall and the Vatican are conspiring to evacuate the social life of the historic center.
CHAPTER FIVE
Life and Law in a Flawed State
he hubris of the nation-state is, as Giambattista Vico noted so long ago,' that it lays claim to an impossible permanence and antiquity. In Rome, that antiquity seems almost tangible; yet Rome is the one capital where the nation-state's agelessness seems most vulnerable to empirical disproof. The religion of the Vatican seems to have stronger claims on eternity. As the capital of a nation-state that has great difficulty in articulating a common culture, Rome is also the site of the promulgation of laws that illustrate how far the state lies from representing a lofty and timeless detachment from human self-interest.
Laws and Regulations
Some brief examples will illustrate how little the state influences the actions of its citizens. Almost opposite the house where I lived was a little side street that gave onto the bustling Via Cavour. It was a one-way street, yet frequently drivers boldly drove straight into it in the illegal direction. Several cars came through this way when the left-wing councilor held his street meeting to discuss, oddly enough, traffic control. No one took the slightest notice of the offending cars; no one seemed at all perturbed about the illegality occurring under their eyes while the politician spoke about the necessity of following legal procedures.
Nearby, a shopkeeper surreptitiously kept under-the-counter tabs for his best customers. The practice is illegal, as he acknowledged with a disdainful shrug. He was more concerned about keeping his customers. Such a performance of trust was an important way of securing their loyalty-perhaps even more so than the economic flexibility that the practice gave them. Residents sometimes seemed to live in genuine fear of the tax police Guardia di Finanza), whose gray uniforms and threateningly parked cars were a source of uneasy glances and whispered mutterings. Rumor had it that people were being stopped on the street to have their machine receipts for purchases checked. The state would have had good reason for this; many shopkeepers, barmen, and restaurateurs produced very incomplete receipts, while the prices their