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politicians' support for the victims of present-day evictions, despite the fact that it had been Mussolini's urban reconstruction that triggered the first major wave of evictions from the district. The issues of rent control and eviction have followed a legal trajectory as piecemeal and as riddled with instrumental compromises as the path of historic conservation. A 1998 law liberalized proprietors' rights, especially through its establishment of a variety of four-year contracts, renewable for a single further four-year term; proprietors could then demand termination of the contract and, when tenants refused to leave, could request police intervention to enforce their rights. Free of rent control and of finite duration, this contract type encouraged a virtual epidemic of rent hikes and consequent evictions.'4 Here, too, we are dealing with legislation that incorporates features perhaps intentionally designed by the lawmakers in Rome to undermine its impact and divert it from its ostensible goals. Legislation providing for strict rent control and a greater balance among the rents paid in a given building-the so-called equo can one principle-had been introduced in 1978. A scathing critique of its intentions and deficiencies is to be found in Corrado Giustiniani's La Casa Promessa (The Promised House)." This work anticipates, in a different context, Berdini's criticisms of gerrymandered regulation and built-in surrender to special interests.

What Giustiniani demonstrates is that a law intended to resolve some of the worst inequities of existing conditions produced exactly the opposite effect. Lacking penal sanctions, and couched in a complex array of cross-references not to speak of an arcane language marked by an extraordinary fertility of legal cant), the law had the ostensibly unintended consequence of encouraging underhand deals among the richer proprietors and an increasing openness to gentrification. Clearly new laws were needed to protect the poor. Such, on the surface, was the goal of the 1998 law, which specifically protected tenants from being evicted without due notice. But it also protected the rights of proprietors against those tenants who had become defaulters (morosi) and gave them a freer hand in determining rents; significantly, it also led to more comprehensive evictions by encouraging proprietors to sell to builders and real estate agents or to speculate for themselves, notably on the basis of a stipulation that renewal of a rental contract could be denied because of the projected "integral restructuring" of an entire building by its current owner.'6 These developments had disastrous consequences for the poorer residents.

Taken together, the two studies illustrate a more general aspect of Italian legislative history. As in most countries with parliamentary systems, politicians emerge from a popular base-either representing its class concerns, or linked to it through vertical ties of patronage, or both. Even so, a few legislators have not only adopted important causes but have also invested a good deal of serious effort in them.

Thus, Luciano Violante, a former president of the Senate, has been consistent and active in developing legislation against usury. His efforts are as deeply appreciated as they are frustrated by the tangle of countervailing laws. Listening to Violante speaking at a major anti-usury conference, at which he attacked the tradition of treating the debtor as complicit in the crime itself much as the church considers borrowers to be theologically culpable for having lured their creditors into the mortal sin of usury, I was struck both by the practicality of his position and the extraordinary amount of legal and social obstructionism he faced. The widow of a victim of usury who had been assassinated for reporting his situation to the authorities warmly declared on another occasion that Violante was an exception to the entire state apparatus, from politicians to carabinieri, in his commitment to breaking the vicious circularity of crime. Yet that was precisely why his efforts seemed unlikely