Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [75]
These laws and regulations, moreover, enacted in Rome, must make practical sense in the capital. Between the writing of these laws and rules and their application, only the formal legal language masks the structural collusion that binds legislature and populace together in a convoluted synergy. That synergy converts civic principles into a civility that has more to do with the easy command of courtesy and with the obligations of friendship and neighborliness than with promoting abstract principles of governance. It preserves much of the trasformismo of an earlier age-and perhaps also the casuistry of a medieval church trying to come to terms with contradictions between generosity and profit-through the reinforcement of an idiom of political tact. However desirable the immediate social effects of such civility may sometimes be, it does not necessarily favor, and in practice often actively subverts, the technical application of the law. New laws are often intended to fix problems created by previous legislation. That is the intention behind the various sanatoria (cleansing laws) by which punishments for previous infractions are reduced and their residue forgiven; city plans are produced to correct the disasters of earlier planning; and rent increases are regulated and deregulated with a calculation that is easily misread as caprice. These devices are socially grounded, necessary, episodic, and circumstantial compromises between formal principle and social reality. A clothes merchant described the state-citizenry symbiosis succinctly and, on the whole, accurately: "The state is fully aware that any merchant, right? is a tax evader.... So, on the state's side, there's a tacit agreement, right? that it will make you pay again later, with other taxes." This restless process, nicely captured in his self-checking speech style, never ceases.
The sanatorie are the most obvious examples of the state's adjustment to the habits of its citizens. Sometimes known as condoni (pardons), especially in the context of building regulations, they allow the state to collect a small but certain percentage of overdue fines in exchange for the cancellation of the remainder. They have provoked vociferous objections, largely on the grounds that they legitimize and perpetuate violations of the laws designed to protect the historic fabric of the city-which ironically derives its rampant beauty, as we have seen, from the proliferation of such infractions through the centuries.' In particular, they have allowed already wealthy speculators, and perhaps also individuals with the convenient power to obtain advance notice of such announcements, to buy and "restructure" substantial properties without troubling themselves excessively about the relevant regulations.
On a broader scale, ambitious city plans (piani regolatori) have emerged at various points in the history of modern Rome; each is designed to correct the errors of its predecessors and of other, more localized interventions.' By their very nature, however, they incorporate the special interests of current administrations. While some have undoubtedly been better conceived than others, they have also remained very much on the level of general possibility; few of their recommendations are ever translated into a consistent, enduring planning practice. In this, they give reality to the capacity of the Italian language to recognize a distinctively high level of abstraction in planning (progettualita, "projectuality"). Such abstraction lends itself to what one might call the alibi of inevitable concreteness; faced with the seemingly ineluctable difficulties of planning Rome's future with any degree of confidence, planners can blame the special interests for which provision is already implicitly made in the plans-indeed, that is the burden of their complaints.
Paolo Berdini's analysis, published when the jubilee was still