Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [81]
The architect's eyes traveled across the horizon with knowing indulgence-complicit affection, one might say-over layer upon layer of legal history and its splintered works. He had built his own share of illegal constructions, and had submitted his own complaints about those of others. He knew this world intimately. So, we may be sure, did all his colleagues and clients. There is nothing new in his complicity. The aristocracy had set a bad example at a still earlier date, especially in the seventeenth century, when they thought little of damaging neighboring houses to the greater glory of their own and in one instance, when checked, vindictively getting the pope to forbid the neighbors to have any windows or doors facing the offended party's palazzo.18
Such power forces others to into a sometimes unwilling resignation. An influential media tycoon, rumored to wield as much authority in Rome as the Vatican itself, wanted a door cut into the Renaissance building where he lived-an act of sacrilege against the architectural heritage that, as an enemy of his remarked, would have put an ordinary person in jail; as it was, when his foe tried to protest to the officers in charge of the building's condominium, they pointed out that no formal complaint had been lodged at the time-and so not only would the work proceed, but the condominium would have to pay for an irreversible disfigurement of the past! Thus is collusion forged out of the very bedrock of opposition even as it reconfigures the built environment yet again. As a retired laboratory assistant from one of Rome's universities remarked, "Here in Italy what is provisional lasts for so very long!i19 It lasts long enough, in fact, to contribute to the sense of a living, breathing city, one that accretes layer after layer of historical departures from previous norms. A few examples of law enforcement make for spectacular exceptions; helicopters spot the illegal constructions, and the bulldozers move in. Many of these interventions occur far from the historic center; they are expensive and therefore necessarily also rare.
Nor is there much popular enthusiasm for them. A furniture restorer, a man both ideologically and professionally much taken with the idea of preserving antiquities (but also one who did not shy away from profiteering through the creative reconstruction of minor art objects, pointed out that one of Italy's endemic problems lay in a besetting preference for construction over conservation; the prevailing pattern of patronage required the immediate gratification of short-term projects rather than the painstaking investment of time and effort in continual refurbishment. The evidence is everywhere; the repeated laying, removal, and replacement of sidewalk cobblestones testifies, in most citizens' opinion, to the corruption that allows crooked contractors to do shoddy work precisely so that they will then be paid for removing and replacing it.
In short, Rome was certainly not built in a day; but it was and is) built and rebuilt at a tempo and according to rules that have rarely been those approved by officialdom-or, more accurately, by officialdom acting officially. It is an architectural monument to something more furtive and yet also more lasting: the capacity to thwart the and admonitions of the law by generating in their place, sometimes out of unpromising materials, a warmly sensual, inhabited, and ecstatically illicit beauty.
In this, the city is consistent with the a church that views the peccadilloes of its endemically errant flock with an indulgent eye. Indulgent indeed-for it is in the practice of offering documents so named (indulgenze), as a documentary guarantee of accelerated passage through Purgatory for the faithful,20 that facilitates the advance calculation of the material cost of sin and allows people to adjust their moral budgets accordingly. In a society where cleverness