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By Root 659 0

a moral alibi for those of ordinary people. A district councilor inveighed against city hall's plans to replace the famous Roman cobblestones with asphalt, suggesting that this kind of work was simply a way of spending money by farming contracts out to loyal supporters. The policy's supporters could point to the damage that cobblestones did to motor vehicles; they also raised the noise level-one of the most familiar night sounds in our street was that of wheeled suitcases bumping over the diamond-shaped sampietrini. Given the choice, however, people usually assume the most cynical of the available explanations. And tales of work created to serve special interests abound; the constant resurfacing of sidewalks is a common example. Such stories reinforce the self-justification of ordinary citizens. Corruption and its benefits, so the implicit argument runs, should not be the exclusive privilege of the rich and powerful.

The political leadership at all levels, from local council to city government, must perform its Romanness for an electorate that, as all politicians know well, includes a constant litany of complaints about the leadership's failures of civic decency. They are trapped in the social imperative to demonstrate precisely the kinds of intimately recognizable trickery or simple disobedience that they officially oppose. When Francesco Rutelli began his tenure as mayor of Rome, for example, he allegedly made quite a point of refusing to wear a seatbelt in his car. To have done otherwise would have been an admission of weakness.2 When the leadership is trapped in this kind of logic, citizens see no compelling reason to follow the laws themselves. In the intimate spaces of their local culture, they see their politicians, not as the embodiments of a civic ideal, but as eminently human tricksters whose social strengths often lie in what civic or religious morality would treat as their moral weaknesses. Adherence to civic ideals sometimes thus clashes directly with distrust of the state's representatives; the formal precision of the state-as opposed to the social engagement of its corrupt officers-is a poor substitute for the warm sociality of local relations.

The Limits of Law

Italians often lament the inadequacy of their legal system to deal with current social problems. Laws are numerous and mutually contradictory, each successive reform being at best a patchwork response to the most pressing difficulties of the existing legislation; and many are written in such a complex way as to encourage highly creative tactics of evasion. Those charged with the enforcement of the laws are underpaid and mutually suspicious; the several police forces operating on Italian soil are frequently goaded into mutual suspicion and surveillance. Some of the laws lack penal teeth; others, so critics maintain, are deliberately framed to obstruct the forces of law and order in the pursuit of their legitimate duties-as, indeed, some of their severest critics concede.

There is a striking convergence of ideologically very diverse perspectives on one key issue: that the mechanisms of state do not favor the consistent enforcement of the laws. On the Left we hear the charge that the multiplicity of laws written with special interests in mind allows abuses on every side. On the Right we hear complaints about the failure of the state to provide adequate salaries and to equip the authorities with sufficient protection from agile lawyers defending dishonest foreigners as well as citizens. But the consensus across the whole political spectrum is that the defects in question produce the indifference known as menefreghismo. And it is clear that these defects originate, at least in part, in the compromises that were made in the formative years of the Italian state in the late nineteenth century.

From the start, the state's leaders struggled to reconcile a perceived need for a strong, centralized state authority with the persistent demands by local political elites for exceptional treatment-concessions to local special interests in the writing of national