Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [9]
Despite its history of local poverty, Rome is still, whether its citizens like it or not and many do not), the national capital. What happens in its intimate side streets reflects and refracts decisions made in its grand administrative palaces and in the halls of international conference centers, not only as part of the continuing attempt to harmonize local life with national and transnational bureaucratic institutions, but also because, at the end of the day, many of these influential bureaucrats are either Roman themselves or have been transplanted to the city and must live with the city's realities.
Sociable Spaces
Much of Rome's public space was built for theatricality and still serves to frame the national leaders' histrionic style; a friend remarked on what a theater the city was when we were enjoying the New Year's Eve celebration, as the late maestro Giuseppe Sinopoli was conducting a full orchestra in the open near the Quirinale, the presidential palace, and massed crowds were thronging the steps and byways. Its side streets and smaller squares, too, are the places of intermezzi, full of pulsing intrigue and the bitterness of stagnating failure. Rome contains and displays the passions that animate the larger world that it both leads and follows. Like the richest of operatic stages, it offers a startling panorama of human complexity and of the intimations of an eternity that forever eludes the grasp, by turns both amiable and avaricious, of a citizenry schooled in the arts of both patient resignation and robust cunning.
Not all the spaces of sociability are equally public. Men hand sometimes women visit bars for quick slurps of espresso, enjoying a moment of companionship that is as brief and as intense as the coffee before returning to shop, taxi, or daily chores, especially during the working day. More serious social encounters take place at lunchtime; in the more relaxed evening dining hours, friends will sometimes send over a bottle of wine, but each table is an island of privacy. Larger gatherings in restaurants, usually in the evenings, signal the regular conviviality of a group of men and women belonging to a rotating credit association. At the weekend, some families gather to enjoy the food at a favorite restaurant-usually the same one week after week, until perhaps some minor disagreement sours the relationship and the clients' opinion of the cuisine. Restaurateurs greet regular customers with demonstrative gestures of affection, occasionally taking them aside to whisper some ribald joke or impart secret news; and the bill will always be reduced from official prices. But many men as well as women are proud cooks; close friends dine in each other's houses, especially as the tourist trade increasingly alienates locals from once-favorite restaurants.
Tourism certainly has an impact on the forms of social engagement, although it is also a convenient scapegoat, or metonym, for the effects of encompassing economic realignments. Romans are heirs to a view of public space as an extension of their homes.l" Even though they no longer engage in the dramatic brawls that were a feature especially of Monti's streets until the interwar years, and no longer share their food and banter of a warm evening sitting in full view of the street, they still often stop to greet acquaintances.
They also share semi-public spaces for the numerous meetings in which they engage. The Monti Social Network, the latest and most inclusive of the various local associations, is often convened in the soothing but spacious interior of a local bookstore; one of its meetings adjourned, on a hot evening, to the steps of a side street where the looming presence of a magnificent palazzo from which ten families were being evicted gave urgency to the agenda item about the rapid depopulation of the district.
Meeting the People
Other meetings have a provisional air. One left-wing counselor sought to boost his popularity by organizing a street meeting to discuss traffic flow issues. Informally attired, lounging on the