The Liberal, the Neoliberal, and the Illiberal - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 26

tion, not fierce moral grandstanding, has—perhaps in consequence of this his-
tory—emerged over long centuries as the preferred social idiom.
such a stance, as i have pointed out elsewhere, makes possible another im-
portant feature of Roman and indeed of italian life.14 This is the condono ed-
ilizio —the legal practice of allowing citizens absolution from past fines by allow-
ing them to pay a small percentage of what they owe in exchange for a document
guaranteeing them immunity from further prosecution for the same offenses.
largely on the basis of local practitioners' observations, i have compared such
documents to the indulgences offered by the church in exoneration of minor sins.
it is not a coincidence that the condono is especially favored by the right-wing
parties, which, perhaps even more than their hardly less corrupt left-wing oppo-
nents, play up an idiom of calculation of what it takes to avoid punishment and
moral responsibility for infractions already committed; trumpet the value and
significance of a national heritage they are nevertheless willing to outsource and
ransack for its financial advantages; and thus once again lay out a model of how
to endorse “tradition” while in practice seeking the proactive means of being able
to continue to offend against its supposed norms.
taking liberties: Rome today and tomorrow
in this way, contemporary Rome maintains practices that have been kept in place
by the continuing power and influence of the church. such templates of collective
self-justification translate easily into the secular sphere. as a right-wing architect
remarks in my film Monti Moments (herzfeld 2007a), abuse of the law is “practi-
cally a tradition here in Rome!” The dominant aesthetic of Roman architectural
restorations leaves stucco façades weather-stained and crumbling in a display of
the mortality of all things human in which we might wish to see the architec-
tural equivalent of corruption in the political sense. The same attitude arguably
also informs the local authorities' remarkable tolerance of graffiti. if we consider
that a high proportion of the graffiti are daubed by right-wingers and are not
infrequently couched in the Roman dialect rather than in standard italian, they
provide a pointed contrast to the formal rejection of foreign language signage
and new “ethnic” restaurants. They also, however, remind us that an increasing-
ly right-wing proletariat will not necessarily be welcomed to the spatial realms
carefully cleansed of the riff raff in expensive designs by the famous architects
and planners collectively known as maxi-stars. municipal leaders, right- and
left-wing alike, have been thinking big, and little people find themselves increas-
ingly excluded from the official aesthetic of the city as a grandiose artwork.
Rome has long been the theater of a peculiar tension between the ethically
permissive and the bureaucratically repressive. This tension has produced in
the population a reciprocal ambiguity, in which apparent acquiescence in the
demands of the powerful—“accommodation”—vies with collusion against the