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By Root 516 0

they object to the excessive regulation that they attribute to the bureaucratic state. That state forbids even internal changes. Yet one furniture restorer told me that when she removed the parquet in her apartment and found a layer of concrete underneath that, she excavated further and found an attractive early-twentieth-century decorated floor that led her to remark that she had been walking on stars without even knowing it! While such modern artifacts might be of little interest to the conservation authorities, moreover, and while her action in digging beneath the parquet could have been construed as a violation of the rules, she clearly felt that, as a Roman "of ten generations" (da dieci generazioni),38 she had a right to decide what was worth preserving.

Sacred Images and Sinful Spaces

The calculation of moral debt and forgiveness is written into the very streets. The convergence between secular and sacred power is ineluctable; it was the papal authority that imposed fines "and other punishments" on those who dared leave their garbage in inappropriate places-a restriction that was apparently as cheekily defied then as the environmental laws requiring differentiated garbage collection (raccolta differenziata) are today. These were secular offenses; but they were framed in the same language and style as the inscription that promises accelerated redemption from Purgatory in exchange for reiterations of the Ave Maria before the Madonna's image.

The Mother of God, thus entreated to mediate on behalf of the humble sinners who have already calculated what her intervention will cost them, is indeed everywhere. We meet her in the little shrine plaques and figurines, the Madonnelle that adorn so many houses around Monti, evidence of a constant and pressing need for intercession. Thus it is that we also meet her, as one somewhat cynical friend noted, in the pose struck by a mother perched demurely on a bed and holding her child, a woman who was acting her part in a real estate scam as the pious tenant who hopes that the new purchaser will remember her need when the deal is struck. She is young; but hers, no less than that of the youthful prostitutes whose antecedents plied their trade in the same location in antiquity, is a very old and recognizable presence here. The iconography that she evokes is even perhaps pre-Christian; many archaeologists argue that the Madonna imagery follows that of the imported Egyptian goddess Isis nursing her son Horus.39 But these Romans were disinclined to take her meek appeal to piety as anything more than the prelude to a scam. Given their conviction that such, too, is the moral standard of the ecclesiastical establishment itself, one wonders why she even bothers-but there are women similarly holding out their hands in a piteous gesture of seeking alms on the main street nearby, and, yes, some take pity on them and drop a few coins in their outstretched hands.

Religious syncretism in the art of fixing and muddling through? Why not? Roman Christianity is a very practical religion, its adherents sinners by self-ascription and thus adept in the arts of self-justification and moral cost-benefit analysis. Invocations of piety for material reasons are unlikely to be challenged when many are convinced that the Vatican colludes with the mafia, where confession has been shown to have served venal political ends, and where papal calls to show charity and hospitality to the homeless seem to coincide, tactlessly but revealingly, with dramatic cases of eviction by churches and confraternities. On the secular authorities' appeal to the citizens to provide paid accommodation for jubilee pilgrims, a banker reckoned that an ordinary householder could make io,ooo,ooo lire that way in the course of a year; but his friend, a picture-framer, retorted that a local priest would only do it for the money!

So what Romans see in the figure of the Madonna is not simply the immaculate Virgin, but the comforter of sinners, and especially of those whose greed for money exceeds their needs and so risks placing their