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to bear fruit. He has actively engaged in interrogating some of the mafia pentiti who claimed to have links with the Roman usurers, and has courageously pursued these connections in the hope of discrediting the local subordinates as members of a criminal network now, since the Clean Hands campaign, far more vulnerable to prosecution than ever before. Aside from the predictable obstruction of self-interested politicians, however, the victims of usury are terrified of speaking out. He must thus overcome structural blockage at both the national and the local levels.

More generally, separating legal judgment from its social context of personal favors and special interests-the goal of civic ethics-makes no sense either analytically or from the residents' pragmatic perspective. Not only are existing reciprocities stronger than the moral authority of a poorly respected state but they provide a key resource in the struggle against its perceived depredations. They are also literally embodied in the built environment. We have seen that the old buildings of Monti (and of the entire historic center) testify to the decay that constitutes the tragic core of the human condition. They also testify to the illegality of their own construction, and in multiple layers at that; each layer creates an aesthetic against which its successors innovate though further violation. Once aesthetic concerns are written into law, moreover, as in the powers vested in the Fine Arts Inspectorate, they become an affront to the informal social management of the built environment. The culture of legal practice is often diametrically opposed to legal prescription; like politics, it operates largely within the constraints and enabling mechanisms of everyday life, and cannot realistically be viewed-except insofar as this provides useful excuses for some of its perceived failures-outside that context.17

Indulgent Complicities

From a windy rooftop offering a glorious view across virtually the entire historic center of Rome, an architect friend sardonically surveyed the panorama. There, and there, and there-he pointed, we looked, and there, indeed has he said) everywhere, were the skimpy scaffoldings shaded by umbrellas that signified the start of haste-driven, illegal construction: a new apartment, a store, a bathroom. But the culprits would have looked hurt had they been able to overhear us; they were just putting up some trellises, nothing of a permanent nature, they would have said; and we would have nodded understandingly, signaling our own complicity in this social reality. But there was no one to hear us, and the roaring wind made it difficult for us to hear even each other. Nature too, it seemed, preferred to encourage discretion.

Then, directed by the architect's didactic finger and his counterpoint of complicit chuckles, we saw the next stage: construction work beyond a doubt. And occasionally we could spot examples of the third and final stage, though this-thus was its success made material-was usually hard to discern: once a structure acquires a roof, the bureaucracy finds itself caught in the web of its own regulatory passions, for domestic structures that are recognizable as such may not be demolished at all without complex procedures that offer little hope of anything more than a financial slap on the wrist-a fine for creating an illegality that will now remain, forever embedded in the architectural fabric of the Eternal City. And of that fine, only a small portion will-perhaps-be paid at long last, in a deal that will help the state out of its persistent skirting of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the offending structures will themselves merge with the cityscape, absorbed into its monumental fabric like countless other illegalities before them.

After all, mused the architect, the entire city is in one sense an illegal construction site. When Napoleon illegally built the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia for his empress Josephine, he was conniving at a practice already old, one that today continues at an accelerated pace: "In Rome abuse of the building code