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By Root 503 0

counts for more than saintliness, any gain in social stature is underwritten by theological guarantees against eventual perdition. Little acts of cunning tip the balance decisively in favor of social standing; a butcher who was unable to find enough chicken livers to satisfy an exigent and extremely wealthy client from a nationally prominent family proudly showed off his cleverness to his assistant-and to me-when he announced that he would mix what he had with some rabbit livers so that the client would never notice the difference! And jewelers save money by filing off small quantities of gold from each object and by beating rings and other objects to a larger size after they have first been shaped.

Minor peccadilloes are the very stuff of social life. Even devout Monticiani know that they can always ultimately count on the sacrament of confession to absolve them from small offenses made necessary, they would argue, by the brute inequalities of everyday social experience. The secular as much as the religious authorities also reject the idea that such deals should become precedents, but in fact know perfectly well that they will. Indeed, public debate about the state's repeated recourse to these measures emphasizes the dangers of habit-forming conveniences for the long-term health of the polity.

Thus, artisans rely on the state's willingness to engage into tacit reciprocity whereby social security payments remain low and are payable in small installments but the pensions are also small. This connivance is "an unacknowledged fact" that the state tolerates, said one (relatively prosperous) restorer, "also because it is just"; as an artisan, he "could never he a major tax evader." Indeed, most tax evasion by artisans is small-scale, and is similarly grounded in shared, tacit understandings. Customers often do not ask for receipts, knowing that in exchange the artisan will not pass on to them the state and other taxes such as Iva, or value-added tax (although a dishonest shopkeeper can as easily take advantage of the related practice of providing a receipt without listing the actual goods so that no one can later check the price); artisans say that for their part it is virtually impossible to survive without a certain proportion of illegal that is, unreceipted) work. One maker of metal stamps and signage told me that his problem lies in working with too many government offices, all of which demand very precise accounting; his accountant tries to talk him into giving fewer receipts in order to reduce his tax bill, but he simply cannot do that in transactions with any official bureau.

Occasionally, on the other hand, if too many private customers ask for reduced prices in exchange for unreceipted work, an artisan has to invent some transactions and declare earnings from these, simply to establish credibility. A carpenter said that he was forced by private citizens to work without a receipt as a way of avoiding value-added tax; he then had to produce imaginary receipts at least to the amount of 40,000,000 lire for the tax year, as this is the minimum that the state simply assumes the artisan must be earning. The financial consequence of declaring his real income would be far worse, forcing him to close down for good. The tax officers presumably recognized the ruse for what it was; they are complicit in what everyone recognizes as a performance and an invention. Such performances have clear and substantive consequences, since, when they are successful, they deflect the bureaucrats' attention away from minor but useful derelictions while saving the bureaucrats a great deal of work into the bargain.

The pattern, then, is of a state system willing to countenance a fairly high degree of defaulting as long as, in the end, it can reclaim a sufficient part of what is owed to it. With the condono edilizio, moreover, the practice is recognized in a systematic and institutional framework, which grants individual absolution under cover of a generic law.21 The authorities established a special office to administer the paperwork of what are,