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By Root 522 0

in effect, prefabricated plea bargains. For Rome alone, nearly half a million requests from the condono of 1985 were further inflated by a sudden influx of another ninety thousand almost as soon as the neoliberal Berlusconi government took power-a great boon to the construction magnates who immediately rushed in to take advantage of this new windfall, but in reality quite a serious financial blow to a municipal administration that now had to clean up the resulting mess. To make matters still more complicated, the older habit of simply adding illegal construction to existing and entirely legal buildings now spread far beyond the confines of the historic center.22 It seems that even the goal of restocking the state's and city's coffers was not well served by the condono policy.

A senior official of the new condono office was quick to point out that the practice followed the Catholic model of the indulgence.' As with the ecclesiastical doctrine of original sin, moreover, those responsible for administering this program are thoroughly aware of the pressures that drive the poorer segments of society, especially, to commit offenses that can then be cleansed, increasing the functionaries' power in the process. For this official, the parallel with the confessional and the indulgence gained further credibility from the fact that the condono did not only benefit the homeowners; the contractors who had undertaken the illegal work could now likewise request similar relief in exchange for paying a predetermined proportion of their residual fines.

The official spoke of the presence of "an enormous illegal real-estate heritage" (un enorme patrimonio immobiliare irregolare). This terminology is richly suggestive; the collective inheritance of illegally constructed buildings is a consequence of the practical difficulty that poor and middleclass citizens face in trying to create decent homes (as the official conceded). Just as the church is as burdened with inherited sin as its flock, so the government inherits its predecessors' debts and the state as a whole inherits a "patrimony" of illegal housing that it would be both cruel and impracticable to demolish in any significant measure. The historic center is less liable to excesses of illegal construction than the outlying and poorer suburbs, if only because major new construction among the monumental remains and baroque streets has now become very rare. The fact that the city police write observational reports (verbali) but have little power to intervene when they do not actually see the illegal construction being carried out, however, allows the owners of the mostly small older houses in the historic center to make changes in infinitesimal increments, and so to evade detection with relative ease as long as they do not interfere with the facades. The entire patrimonio of the old city is thus, as the architect pointed out from the rooftop, riddled with effects of centuries of accumulated illegal construction; the sins of the city fathers have truly been visited on successive generations-a logical corollary, albeit one that would not be evident to the stranger's unknowing eye, of the Vatican's monumental strategy of enfolding the present consequences of original sin in an architectural forward march toward eternity."

It is also an inheritance that carries within itself the marks of a temporality that is embedded in social life rather than in the rule of law. Indeed, the 1985 law itself recognized the problem, and the official remarked that with this law the state created "the moratorium on this heritage that was called "sub-spontaneously [sic] construction heritage"-a curious term, as he admitted, and used to describe the vast agglomeration of illegal building that it would now be virtually impossible to dismantle. The law sought to legalize this "sub-spontaneity" retroactively, thereby ensuring that yet another layer of illegal construction be added to Rome's already massively encrusted architectural history. The official described it as " paying a sum of money as an oblation, and then