Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10(3) 2005: 281 – 296

Liberal decorum and men in conflict: Rome, 1871 – 90

Domenico Rizzo
Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’

Abstract
This essay examines court cases involving insult to a public official, which came
before the local courts in Rome in the second half of the nineteenth century. It
underlines the gendered character of this particular offence, which was committed
almost exclusively by men. The analysis correlates two aspects of these cases: the first
is the context of the offenses, characterized by the application of a detailed set of local
police regulations, and experienced as a limitation of masculine personal liberty. The
second aspect relates to the institutional organization of the police forces and the
masculine identity of the officers themselves. The combination of these two elements
during interactions between population and the police forces meant that the subjects’
gender became more significant than other variables (such as social class), to the
extent that these interactions took on the inflections of a performative ‘face-off’. In
this way the variable of gender brings into question the traditional reading of public
order in the Liberal era as the product of a policy of containment of the popular
classes.
Keywords
Masculinity, urban police, conflict, insult to a public official, liberal state.

Insulting the ‘force’: a question of gender?

One afternoon in December 1874, Arcangelo – a 26-year-old Roman
butcher’s boy – urinated on the wheel of one of the carts he used to transport
meat, in the vicinity of other carters. A member of the municipal guard
approached and fined him for contravening Article 92 of the Urban Police
Regulations, which explicitly prohibited the performance of bodily functions
in public places. By way of reply, Arcangelo turned towards the officer,
exhibiting his ‘virile member as an act of contempt’. The interaction became
animated and a dozen fellow carters came to support Arcangelo. The officer
soon found himself in difficulty, but thanks to the intervention of a policeman,
the youngster was arrested, tried, and condemned to 5 months imprisonment
for ‘insurrection’ and ‘offense to public decency’.1

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13545710500188148
Italian masculinities

As a legal case, there is nothing exceptional about Arcangelo’s trial. In fact,

in the decades following Italian unification, rebellion, violence and offences
against members of the forces of public order – police officers and municipal
guards, but also military and tax officials – amounted to a significant
phenomenon. In 1880 for example, ‘insurrection’ accounted for over 60% of
all cases heard at the criminal courts relating to offences against the public
administration.2 Naples, Venice and Rome show the highest levels of conflict
between the population and police corps. The judicial statistics indicate a
phenomenon whose rate of growth was greater than the rate of demographic
increase.
Historians who have investigated public security policies in Italy after
unification have underlined the policing apparatus’s intrinsic aim of politico-
social control, and have brought to light a double standard of legality: one for
persons of ‘civil status’, those who owned property and had the right to vote, to
whom statutory guarantees applied in full; and the other, applying to the
popular classes – covering the socially and politically dangerous classes – to
whom the police could apply preventive measures that disregarded the
fundamental ‘liberal’ guarantees.3 In particular, the operation of the forces of
law and order in Rome has been interpreted as the expression of the political
need for ‘a tranquil capital’.4 In general terms these evaluations seem to
correspond with the data on conflict between police and the population, but a
closer analysis of the conflicts themselves, one which takes gender into account,
reveals a much more complex reality.
Such conflict, which has been little studied with relation to specific contexts
and the social interactions that define them, is better documented in the
archives of the Preture urbane (similar to the local courts). The pretore, in fact,
was the magistrate with the closest relationship with micro-criminality (and
thus also micro-conflict), judging the most minor infractions of the law.5 The
jurisdiction of this position was closely linked to the maintenance of legality at
the local level, which meant that the pretore was a key figure, all the more so in a
phase of institutional consolidation following national unification. Contem-
porary writings made the pretore the subject of a particular rhetoric, emphasizing
the magistrate’s role as a ‘civil missionary’. The sentences handed down by the
Pretura urbana of Rome reveal a large number of cases of insurrection and insult
to a public official. Most of these cases were fairly minor, usually resulting in a
sentence of a few days in prison.6
Looked at as a whole, cases of this type clearly reveal the existence of at least
one clear fact: the accused were nearly always men. Many had typically male
jobs, such as coachman, carter and innkeeper, and were subject to particular
regulations and controls in public space, but this is not sufficient to explain the
preponderance of men among the cases, because many of the rules and
regulations concerning daily life also involved women, and a large number of
women were indeed charged with contravening municipal regulations. In fact,
women were charged as often as men for petty crimes such as failing to exhibit

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prices on merchandise, littering, or begging. In other words, arguments

centering on a low female presence in the public sphere (already broadly
discredited by much women’s history), or the notion that women had fewer
occasions for potentially conflictual interactions with public officials, no longer
hold.
The problem, then, was that women were very rarely charged with insulting
public officials. The Pretore urbano was the judge before whom women
appeared most often, but, apart from petty theft, these were mostly cases of
insult, defamation, or aggression launched by other women’s complaints, or
cases in some way related to sexual honour.7 Thus, even if women could hurl
insults and be litigious, when it came to receiving a fine, for example from a
municipal guard, the chance of this leading to a conflict was almost entirely
limited to encounters between men. For the years in which data separated by
gender is available, the number of men so charged exceeded women by a ratio
of ten to one. Regardless of whether this was because women did not insult
officials, or because officials did not perceive themselves as offended by the
reactions of women, it is fair to say that insult to a public official derived from
the particular dynamics between men.
This essay develops this argument, presenting the initial results of research
in progress on conflictual interactions, considering not only the masculinity
of the offenders, but also that of the officials. From this perspective it will
be asked whether masculine identity complicates the issues at stake
compared with traditional ‘political’ interpretations of the practice of public
security and, if so, whether the variable of social status should be re-
evaluated.

‘Civilizing’ public space: a project and its protagonists

Preponderant among the cases heard by the Pretore are conflicts that arose from
the application of the regulations of the municipal police. This is a particularly
interesting area of the law, in which the liberal project of governing society
encountered the reality of the administration of a city.
The example of Rome can be considered emblematic: when the city was
annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, the regulations of Florence, which in turn
were based on the English example, were taken as a model. Presenting his
Progetto di regolamento di polizia urbana to the Consiglio comunale, Alessandro
Spada declared himself convinced that the regulations

must be particularly detailed for our city, since it will be necessary to destroy
the many bad habits of our people . . . . Once they have acquired the habit of
obeying laws, and have taken to heart the need to protect the monuments
and buildings of this great and beautiful city, its decorum, public decency,
cleanliness of the streets and piazzas, the walls of the houses, and so on;
when, in short, our people, by respecting laws, have become civil . . ., then

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we shall have arrived at the fortunate epoch in which the regulations of the
urban police can be much more simple and brief.8

This statement expresses an explicit wish to give Rome the appearance of a

‘civilized’ city. The entire Regolamento is in fact focused on the image of the
city’s public space and on the transformation of the customs and habits of its
population. The intent is clearly educative, and goes beyond the need for a
‘tranquil capital’, or simply preventing disorder through the micro-control of
urban space. The aim is to improve behaviour. The concept of a ‘civil capital’,
in other words, if it has a repressive aspect, also possesses a programmatic
element, and it would be limiting to reduce this to mere social control – it was
part of a broader European process of transformation of urban spaces and the
conditions of life of the popular classes.9 The liberals of Rome therefore
represented themselves as a force of ‘progress’, attributing the city’s
backwardness to the pontifical regime, and they aimed for a realignment with
European civilization.
Spada seems to be aware of the inherent paradox of the liberal government’s
project: to impose a detailed set of regulations on behaviour while at the same
time proclaiming liberation from the yoke of the old regime. The application
of all the laws of the Regolamento, divided as they were into fifteen sections,
would have required a substantial operation of control and repression. It could
be said that the aim of transforming occupations, habits and lifestyles, through a
complete redefinition of the relationship between public and private space,
amounts to a ‘Jacobin’ proposal.10
For example, Part V, ‘Disposizioni relative al decoro pubblico, alla decenza
pubblica, alla quiete e all’ordine pubblico’, prohibits farriers and veterinarians
from exercising their profession in public view (art. 79); it prohibits butchers
from being seen with ‘dirty or bloody clothes and equipment’ (art. 81) and
from displaying butchered beasts and offal outside the shop, as well as ‘all
objects that may offend public decorum’ (art. 82); meat, once purchased, was to
be carried in covered baskets (art. 84), as should bread and pasta (art. 86). Also
prohibited was combing one’s hair in a public place (art. 88) or brushing
domestic animals (art. 89); answering ‘the call of nature outside public latrines’
was prohibited (art. 92). ‘In general it is prohibited to expose nudity, sores, or
repellent deformities’ (art. 93); ‘drivers of public transport, carts, or any vehicle,
must always maintain decorous and decent conduct. Shouts, obscenities,
quarrels and uncivil ways, shall be considered and punished as contraventions’
(art. 95).
In this way the Regolamento established a multiplicity of boundaries between
that which should be concealed and that which may be shown, removing from
public space anything that had to do with naked organic material. In terms of
space, the Regolamento thus defined a variety of private zones, each the product
of the expulsion of a material activity from public space, different for each
category of the population and for each precinct of urban life. This was a vast

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project, far beyond the capacity of the available forces to police, to the point
that the transitional arrangements immediately introduced numerous tempor-
ary exceptions.11
Central to the theme of this essay is the fact that most conflicts with
public officials were caused by attempts to enforce laws of this type, which
attempted a radical redefinition of what was ‘private’: they were laws that
impinged on the area of personal liberty. Also central, however, is the social
profile assumed by the agents required to apply these norms, the identity
conferred by their uniforms, the model of the police officer in which
nineteenth-century states placed their faith. The implementation of the
project of ‘civilization’ was entrusted to the police forces. Their effectiveness
depended upon the daily interactions between the population and the forces
of order, in which the identity of the subjects on both sides constitutes a
fundamental variable.
In Liberal Italy the debate on the image of police officers constantly
swung between two models, both problematic in the eyes of contempor-
aries. The first was an ambition of rooting this identity in social reality,
based on the capacity to evaluate situations case by case. At the same time,
the acquisition of this capacity on the part of police officers could threaten
corruption, or at the very least, partiality in judgment. The second model
was a separate, militarized police corps, which however presented equally
threatening risks: the possibility of confrontations between institutions and
citizens, with the possibility of a negative judgment by ‘civil persons’, in
whose eyes there may have been little difference between the liberal
government and previous regimes.
It was no mere chance that awareness of the image of police agents was very
strong in Piedmont in 1848, during a political upheaval that saw the concession
of the Piedmontese constitution. Pier Dionigi Pinelli, minister of the interior,
presented parliament with a proposal that would have de-militarized public
security forces. His report explained that the job of policing was one that
should proceed according to ‘clues and conjecture’, and it should ‘discern the
moment and the person on whom it is opportune to act’. For this reason, he
argued, it is not possible to follow rigid norms, but ‘things should necessarily be
left to the prudence and wisdom of the inquiring officer’. He continued:

This power has hitherto been entrusted to military officials, whose habits and
soldierly virtue form the basis of their character, and are by their nature not suited
to cautious and detailed enquiry into the facts and their causes, nor to a
discerning interpretation of the laws and norms that need to be applied, and
the powers they possess, however appropriate, can have the appearance of
despotism in the eyes of the public, who increasingly find the element of
force intolerable; and this unfavourable impression is then converted into
disrespect for other officials, as if they were the instruments of an irrational
empire, in the service of caprice rather than the law.12

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Pinelli outlined an ideal: among the tasks of the police officer he included those
of pacifier when there were tensions between citizens and even within the
family. Above all, in his view, it was necessary to ‘explore personally, using
sober and intelligent persons, the needs of the less well-to-do classes, as well as
the causes of discontent that have appeared among the public on any matter,
and the means most appropriate to bringing them to an end’.13 According to
this view, the police were to function as an interface between government and
citizens, bringing to the role both knowledge of everyday reality and ability to
mediate among private individuals.
The significance of Pinelli’s speech lies in the fact that it privileges the
subjectivity of the officials of law and order: ‘soldierly virtue’ rendered military
personnel unfit for the task. It expresses the conviction that resistance resulted
not so much from the intrinsic nature of the ‘dangerous classes’, with their lack
of respect for authority, but because that authority related to the ‘less well-to-
do classes’ using men who were not appropriate, given the intended goals.
The actual choices made went in a direction opposite to the programme
outlined by Pinelli, both before and after unification. Even at the end of the
century, single men in barracks remained the rule for the police forces, even if
this arrangement drew criticism because it made police officers into outsiders in
terms of the people, places, habits, customs, and dialects of the cities in which
they operated.14
The corps of municipal guards in Rome were emblematic of this. In the first
place, their legal powers were much greater than in the past; so much so that in
the first years the changed perception of their authority gave rise to
innumerable conflicts. One inspector of police remembers this aspect of the
people of Trastevere, a working-class quarter of Rome, in his Memoirs as early
as 1870:

A rudimentary urban police service was established, and a few municipal

guards appeared in the early days of October . . . . The people of Trastevere,
opposing restrictions of any type, immediately began to resist those poor
agents of the municipality when they tried to limit the illegalities of the
carters and drivers, the true masters of Rome, or curb certain habits, which,
particularly near restaurants in the evening hours, transformed the squares
and streets into putrid quagmires. The acts of rebellion were infinite.15

Two forms of conduct – the driving of carts and performing of bodily functions
– both masculine and tied to the use of public space, are mentioned as the most
frequent causes of conflict. The case of Arcangelo, with which we began, is
exemplary, but so was the behaviour of the other carters who supported him:
they confronted the municipal guard but ran off when the police arrived. The
fact that the municipal guards also had the powers of judiciary police, and could
therefore make arrests, was, in fact, a new provision introduced after
unification, and had not yet been fully recognized by the population.

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The municipal guards were organized along military lines. By contrast

with arrangements in other cities, in Rome the ratio of three single men
per married man was established as the norm, and they were obliged to live
in barracks and eat at a communal canteen. The aim behind this was to
reduce to a minimum the private interests that might arise, whether from
marriage, or the frequenting of particular taverns and other establishments.
At the same time, according to the municipal laws, these measures
promoted ‘the brotherly harmony generated among the guards around a
communal table’.16
The establishment of separate military corps, made up principally of single
men, held together by a spirit of camaraderie, and, moreover, a corps in search
of legitimation, provides the context to be kept in mind in attempting to
understand the conflicts resulting from intervention in public space. The
military organization of the urban police resulted from an ideal that required
recognition of the impersonal symbols of public authority – as embodied in the
uniform – by the citizens, but, at the same time, this imposed on the police
officers themselves a requirement of neutrality with respect to their own
identities that was very difficult to establish.

‘We should take turns being guards . . .’

Returning to the case of Arcangelo, we saw that he reacted to the fine by
displaying his genitals to the guard: evidently the display had no erotic content;
first and foremost it was a taunting gesture which assumed a particular symbolic
meaning of defiance because it was focused on a person who was both equal –
in so far as he was a man, of similar age, and a fellow resident of the city17 – and
superior, as a member of a police corps.
The bodily code which the young fellow made use of was a provocation to
both these dimensions of identity: that of police officer, because it refused the
normal level of respect; and the officer’s masculinity, which was taunted and
belittled. These two planes of expression are characteristic of the cases heard by
the court.
However, along with particular modes of expression, it was the presumption
of conflict that fully defines the situation. Arcangelo’s gesture was a reaction to
reprimand, to restriction, and, not least, to the fine imposed for behaviour that
was not permitted in public. It was a behaviour that for Arcangelo was
completely inscribed in his own ‘private’ sphere, but which for the guard, on
the other hand, appeared as a contravention.
Not all conflicts culminated in genital exhibition, but in most of them a
strong component of gender emerged from the attempts by the police corps to
apply the norms regulating public space, particularly the Regolamento of the
municipal police, the intricacy of which has already been noted.
The ‘public decency’ contravened by Arcangelo was therefore not merely a
pretext for the exercise of social control. Rather, it was a grammar that

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expressed a widely diffused level of conflict deriving from opposing concepts of

what was and was not permissible in public places.
A case which occurred five years later, in March 1880, allows further
consideration of these dynamics. A 23 year-old porter, Aureliano, was urinating
in the street when two municipal guards charged him with contravening
Article 92.18 Aureliano responded ‘Se non te ne vai, te la do io la
contravvenzione, va via brutto beccamorto che sei’ (‘If you don’t go away,
it’ll be me who gives you the fine, go away you ugly gravedigger’). Meanwhile
a dozen or so of his friends surrounded the guards and began to hurl insults.
One of the guards ran to call for reinforcements, while the other requested
Aureliano to follow him to the barracks, but he responded ‘Se non te ne vai ti
do io un sacco di sganassoni’ (‘Go away or I’ll break your jaws’), raising his
right hand menacingly as he did so. As three other guards arrived, Aureliano
ran off, taking refuge in a tavern. He was discovered hiding in a cupboard in
the kitchen, and was arrested while bystanders pelted the officers with ‘a torrent
of stones’.
The gesture of threat is a topos of conflict between males, particularly at the
height of an argument (the ancient city statutes, for example, included such
gestures among possible offences).19 In effect this was a heavily ritualized
gesture, particularly the variant of reaching for the knife.20 Thus a young
porter, invited not to ‘splash beyond the urinal’, yelled out, ‘pig’ and ‘you will
pay for this’, as he made the gesture of ‘reaching inside his pocket for a knife’.21
This was a show of strength and courage, a display of readiness for a physical
encounter to defend liberty, whether it be personal or political. For example, a
group of young carters was heard shouting these words to the guards in 1880:
‘Boja, assassini, vi possano ammazzare, ma verrà Garibaldi e allora vi
ammazziamo tutti’ (‘Executioners, assassins, you should be slaughtered, but
Garibaldi will come and we will kill all of you’).22
Faced with limitations on their behaviour in public, these men returned to
political discourse, revealing doubts about the liberty the new regime was
supposed to have conferred. This is an interesting doubt, which is not merely
being used as a pretext, and deserves further research. It suggests that the
population may have felt the weight of the forces of order much more heavily
than in the past.23 When guards entered a tavern to ascertain that there was no
gambling or drunkenness, a butcher said to them, ‘Voi venite a fare della
boierie’ (‘You have come to do hangman’s business’) – referring to a powerful
symbol in the Roman popular imagination. He continued ‘Non siamo più al
tempo del governo pontificio, ora è libertà e vogliamo fare quel che ci pare e
piace’ (‘We’re no longer under the papal government, now there is liberty and
we want to do what we feel like and what we enjoy’).24
Explicit reference to the former government was made again by a carter
who was stopped and fined: ‘Sotto il governo del Papa si rubava nelle macchie,
e in [sic] oggi si sgrassa la gente per la gola portandola negli uffici’ (‘Under the
papal government there were robberies in the countryside, but now the people

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are grabbed by the throat and fleeced at the police station’).25 A carter and a
porter, resisting a fine and refusing to go with the guards, both had strong
words to say. The first said ‘Io non voglio venire con voi, brutti puzzoni,
assassini, andate a prenderlo in culo voi e il vostro Re Vittorio Emanuele’ (‘I
don’t want to go with you, you stinking brutish assassins, go and take it up the
arse, you and your king Victor Emmanuel’). The other said ‘Volete proprio
morire ammazzati, brutti assassini, io non conosco né leggi né papi, né Re, né
Sindaci, perché siete una massa di sgrassatori da strada e se non ve ne andate sarà
per finirla male’ (‘You are really asking for it, you filthy assassins, I couldn’t care
less about laws, popes, kings, or mayors – you’re all a bunch of highway robbers
and if you don’t get out of here, it’s going to get ugly’).26
Once again, the tension derives from the perception that personal liberty is
under threat, relating to behaviour that was usually left to private self-
regulation. What is at stake is an attempt at urban engineering in an
anthropological sense, inspired by a hierarchy of importance, at the top of
which is a rigid definition of the confines between private and public.
‘Bamboccio, cappellone, prete’ – thus a man of 34 insulted the guard who
repeatedly invited him to put out his cigarette in the foyer of the Theatre
Capranica. Eventually, at the third request, he ‘threw the cigarette down
disrespectfully and placed his foot over it’, insulting the guard as he did so.27
The political content of the insults to the guards echoes a widespread
sentiment, a vox populi on the change of regime, which is most useful for
measuring the perception of the new government at a popular level, but
because the confrontation occurs at the level of sensitive matters of personal
liberty, it is not the ideal terrain on which to analyze such questions.
At the same time, the political content assumed the guise of a pretext on
both sides of the confrontations. The centrality of provocative gestures
suggests that the object of contention was the reciprocal recognition of the
subjects: recognition of the liberty of one group, and the authority and
personal dignity of the others. Gender permeates these conflicts, because the
challenge to both liberty and authority was experienced as an insult at the
heart of a ‘face-off’.28 The same political danger was ‘exploited’ by the
guards to justify their role rather than as the basis of an evaluation of true
danger.
For example, on 12 November 1885, a driver, Giovanni Del Bigio, a 33
year-old Roman, was entering the city via the Ripetta Bridge. Tax inspectors
signalled him to stop so they could examine his cart. He refused. The guards
insisted. Giovanni said to one of them: ‘Levati la divisa e vieni fuori porta,
vigliacco te e chi t’ha dato la divisa’ (‘Take your uniform off and step out of the
city gates, coward that you are, and he who gave you the uniform’).29
Giovanni’s words synthesize two levels on which the conflict is played out.
The first relates to identity and the conflict between men (‘drop your uniform
. . . coward’): from his point of view, the uniform comes between them,
blocking the possibility of an encounter between equals – the guard is a coward

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because he hides behind it. The guise of public official is a protective mask that,
as a man, he should drop. The second level, that of ‘and he who gave you the
uniform’, relating to the institution and the laws, is willingly overlooked,
concentrating all the attention at a personal level.
The area ‘outside the gates’ into which Giovanni invites the guard to
step, as a man, without uniform, is an un-urban, uncivilized space,
unregulated by the laws of the city – a space in which the contest can take
place untainted by social roles.30 The imagination of this possibility is the
most interesting cultural aspect of this and other encounters. The liberal
civilizing mission had to reckon with this in order to affirm itself in public
space. The mission of civilization was able to advance to the same extent
that individuals were prepared to cede progressively, in daily life, to the
norms and institutions embodied in the police uniform. To become ‘civil’
meant – and not only according to the liberal worldview – interiorizing,
and therefore instinctively recognizing, social roles. In this case, it would
mean putting aside the interlocutor’s gender in favour of the stable identity
conferred by the uniform.
In most cases, however, we come across an expression of the fantasy of
exchanging roles. Sometimes, as we have seen, these fantasies could assume
a political hue: ‘che te possino ammazzatte, che belle leggi, finirà, finirà,
venirà [sic] il momento che comanderemo noi antri, brutti bojaccia’ (‘You
should be killed, what great laws, it will all end, the moment will come
when we are in command, you ugly hangmen’).31 But more often the
reference is to a more ‘personal’ exchange of roles: a 19 year-old driver, on
being fined, offered no resistance, but as the guard walked off, said
‘Bisognerebbe fare la guardia una volta per uno, cosı̀ ti farei la boieria che
fai a me’ (‘We should take turns being guards, then I will give you the
hangman nonsense you’re giving me’).32
It is against this background that a sort of code of masculine obscenity came
into being, chiefly among working-class men. It acted as a resource of symbolic
offence, used at the risk of attracting not just the charge of insulting a public
official but also that of offense to public decency, as in the case of Arcangelo.
More often than not, it was the former charge that led to conflict. For example,
in November 1890, when a policeman intervened in a violent argument
between a man and a woman, the man, a 44 year-old labourer, said to the
guard: ‘Che sei venuto a fare? Che fai osservare, la legge del c. . .?’ (‘What are
you doing? What f. . .ing law are you trying to enforce?’) and – we read in the
sentence which sent him to prison for three months – ‘not content with this he
took out his virile member’.33
As a response to invasion of the private sphere, genital exhibition appears as
an alternative to violence. The carter Giovanni Del Bigio attempted to move
the conflict into a space where norms and laws meant nothing, ‘outside the
gates’, where the conflict would be a simple animal struggle. The labourer, on
the other hand, draws on the inventory of ‘fuori scena’ (according to the

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etymology of the term ‘obscenity’), opposing his nakedness to the uniform

embodying authority.
The impersonality of the law slowly became the central issue for both sets of
subjects involved in these clashes. Fundamental to this was that the ‘bearing’ of
the guards should be as correct as possible, that is, with minimal displays of
arrogance. The regulations expressed strong awareness of this, and imposed
such behaviours on the law’s representatives. In reality though, these men
derived identity and power from the uniform, revealing extreme sensitivity to
the recognition of their function.
The magistrates themselves often articulated this very notion explicitly.
One, in response to the arrogant bearing of certain tax officials, noted: ‘From
the depositions arises the possibility that the facts have been exaggerated for the
purpose of avenging the observations expressed by the accused’.34
The magistrates revealed a certain balance in their evaluations and not
infrequently absolved the accused, judging that no offense to a public official
had been committed. Even in Giovanni’s case, though finding him guilty, the
magistrate felt that ‘because of the special circumstances of the case, the
punishment . . . should be minimal’: six days in prison.
A minimal punishment was the rule. Frequently the guards’ charges were
considered insufficiently proven, as in a case when someone expectorated from
a carriage as it went along.35 In other cases attenuating circumstances were
taking into account, such as former good conduct, as well as defenses such as
‘irritation to the soul’, or the perceived lack of ‘the spirit of offense’.36
Above all, judges were clement in cases when the offense was founded on
the notion of a swapping of roles. For example, in the case where ‘we should
take turns being guards’, the sentence declared:

These words, both in their content, which constitutes cheek rather than
offense, and the spirit with which they were said, expressing the pain of
infringement rather than aiming to insult the honour and respectability of
the public agent to whom they were directed, and said out of ignorance
rather than animosity, are not considered to possess the character of an
offense.

Accordingly, the case was dismissed.37 The attitude of the magistrates suggests
recognition of the difficulty both sides faced in remaining impersonal.

Social hierarchies
The theme of reciprocal recognition between citizens and the forces of order,
read as a clash between masculine identities within a civilizing mission seeking
to redefine behaviours, provides a new perspective on police action, which,
according to a traditional interpretation, weighed disproportionately on the
‘dangerous classes’. In fact, there are more complex factors at work, and in the

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redefinition of public space, social class does not operate in an unequivocal

way.
Regardless of social class, the new controls were experienced as an
infringement of personal liberties. If what is ‘private’ is all that pertains to
liberty of action, regardless of place, men of ‘civil condition’ might even
have seen the new limitations in terms of lack of respect for social
hierarchies.
On 2 May 1875, Placido Valle, an under-secretary at the Ministry of War,
was declared to be in contravention of the laws because he was found urinating
in Piazza Venezia. He told the guard: ‘I know the regulations better than you,
indeed I tell you you are an imbecile’.38 In terms of personalization of the
conflict, the official’s reaction was not very different from a carter’s, except that
knowledge and intellectual power took the place of physical force. The
magistrates were clement with him as well, recognizing attenuating
circumstances, but sentencing him to pay a fine of 20 lire (this converted to
ten days in prison in cases of indigence, so the penalty was slightly higher than
Giovanni’s punishment).
Another example where both male honour and social superiority were
seemingly threatened by the interference of the public official is provided by a
case in 1900. Once again the motive was the application of Article 96 of the
municipal regulations. The guard issued a fine to Carlo Crea, a Sicilian teacher
aged 37. The teacher offered his visiting card to the officer, on which was
printed his home address. At first it seemed the guard accepted the card in place
of proof of identity, then he had second thoughts, suggesting that the teacher
might be lying, and asked him to come to the police station. Carlo was
offended, and said to the guard: ‘You can only permit yourself to suggest that I
might be lying because you are wearing that uniform; if you were not, a similar
insult would have led to blows’.39 The teacher was charged with insulting a
public official but the case was dismissed as unfounded.
Another interesting case where peeing gave rise to conflict occurred in
1884. Twenty-five year-old Salvatore, a clerk in the Ministry of Public Works,
was originally from just south of Naples, but resident in Rome and married to a
40-year-old Roman woman. On the evening of 26 October the couple went
to the theatre with a work colleague – single, of similar age to Salvatore, and
also from outside Rome – and a 36-year-old Roman woman. After the show,
Salvatore was urinating on the sidewalk, and, following a familiar script, two
municipal guards approached. Salvatore claimed that he was grabbed by the
lapels (‘I said I was not a vagabond or a rogue nor a murderer and there was no
reason to treat me like that’40). The guards claimed that, having asked Salvatore
to come to the station because he refused to pay the fine, he said ‘If you don’t
go away this instant, you stinking brutes, I’ll blow your brains out’, and then,
‘take that stinking uniform off and then you’ll see whether I’m a man capable of
spilling your guts’. Salvatore’s register is identical to that of the butcher, but a
difference lies in the reference to a firearm, which was more bourgeois than the

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knife. Nevertheless, the perception of the uniform as an obstacle to an equal

contest between men is the same.
The reaction of the women adds to a sense of the way the event was
experienced by the protagonists. Salvatore’s wife said ‘We are of a Roman
family, and we will be going to complain to Mayor Torlonia and have you
removed, you cowardly rogues’. She invokes her sense of belonging in the city,
which she believes confers a right to oppose the base force used by the guards.
These claims took on a hue of the new liberal era, with Salvatore’s wife saying
‘We are no longer living under the Pope’, and her friend adding, ‘Whether we
are under the priests or the Austrians, this is no way to behave’.
The sentence read:

Recognising that the defendants are both of civil condition, and thus aware
of the respect owed to representatives of the P(ublic) F(orce), even though
they were not senior, and the violent nature of the insult, a severe
punishment is called for. However, since on the other hand there is no
previous record of offense, it is considered in conformity with justice to
apply a sentence of six days in prison.

Effectively, the magistrate displayed maximal balance. He implicitly recognized

the higher social status of the couple with respect to the guards, but affirmed
the principle of legality and opted for a minimum sentence.
Comparison of cases involving working-class men and men of ‘civil
condition’ shows that conflicts were resolved in a show of force, in the first case
at a physical level, and in the second, at the level of higher social status. In both
cases the conflict has the same goal: the rejection of any intervention over a
behaviour which is perceived as private to the extent that it consists of an
extension of the subject’s own personal physical sphere. Ultimately this is the
crux of the question: on the one hand, what is public and what is private is
defined in rigorously spatial terms; on the other, a concept of the personal-
private which coincides with the physical person and freedom of action. Public
urination, in this sense, is an emblematic pretext because it relates to a
compelling physical need, to a bodily impulse that is absolutely ‘private’.

Conclusions
In the years following the establishment of the liberal regime after Italian
unification, the prevalence of males among those charged with offense to a
public official has rich implications for the study both of public order in the
liberal period, as well as contemporary masculinity.
The liberal project of ‘civilization’ meant that public space was subject to
intricate norms, which brought with them a redefinition of the perception of
personal liberty. This resulted in intense pressure on masculine identity, which
tends to become inscribed in any action within a face-off between men where

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the stakes are always a confirmation of virility. The extent to which the
impersonal role of the guards was acknowledged and the conflict was not
carried ‘fuori porta’ or ‘fuori scena’ may well become one of the most useful
measures of the transformation of masculine identity in the twentieth century.
Another important aspect that also requires further research – for example
the abuse of authority – concerns the fact that personalization also involved the
guards; which is to say that the neutral and modern symbol of the uniform
became part not just of their personal identity but of their identity as men.

Notes
1 Archivio di Stato di Roma (henceforth ASR), Tribunale penale di Roma (TP),
Processi (Pr), b. 3.098 fasc. 6.822; ivi, S, v. 5.497, 10 February 1875.
2 Measured by the application of articles 247 – 67 of the Codice penale sardo-italiano;
in absolute values the figures were 4,009 cases out of a total of 6,533: see Ministero
Agricoltura Industria e Commercio, Statistica giudiziaria degli affari penali per l’anno
1881, Rome, 1883, pp. 144 – 51.
3 On the 1848 constitution, extended to the entire Kingdom of Italy after unification,
see Ghisalberti, C. (1974) Storia costituzionale d’Italia (1848 – 1948), Rome – Bari.
For broad coverage of various issues of public security, see, among others:
Amministrazione e poteri di polizia dagli Stati pre-unitari alla caduta della Destra, Roma,
1986; La pubblica sicurezza, ed. P. Barile, Milano, 1967. On the two levels of legality,
Lacchè, L. (1990) La giustizia per i galantuomini. Ordine e libertà nell’Italia liberale: il
dibattito sul carcere preventivo (1865 – 1913), Milan. The concept is further developed
by Sbriccoli, M. (1998) ‘Caratteri originari e tratti permanenti del sistema penale
italiano (1860 – 1990)’, in L. Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia – Annali, 14: Legge Diritto
Giustizia, Turin, pp. 485 – 551, pp. 489 – 92. Cf. also Rodotà, S. (1995) ‘Le libertà e
i diritti’, in R. Romanelli (ed.), Storia dello Stato italiano dall’Unità a oggi, Roma; and,
covering all these issues, Davis, J. A. (1989) Legge e ordine. Autorità e conflitti nell’Italia
dell’800, Milan.
4 See Caracciolo, A. (1993) Roma capitale. Dal Risorgimento alla crisi dello Stato liberale,
Rome, which focuses on the need for social calm, linking it to the choice not to
invest in an industrial ‘take off’ for the city.
5 Those attracting a maximum penalty of three months as well as all the
contraventions mentioned in the Criminal Code and special laws; cf. Del Giudice,
A. (1902 – 12) ‘Pretore (Ordinamento giudiziario e procedura penale)’, Digesto
Italiano, XIX: 893 – 937, in particular pp. 919 – 21. The statistics for cases heard by
the preture were not broken down into types of crime and were only registered in
total figures.
6 The following registers were examined: ASR, Archivio della Pretura Urbana di
Roma [henceforth PU], Sentenze [S], reg. 2 (7 June – 8 August 1871); reg. 8 (2
January – 27 February 1872); reg. 46 (1 – 31 January 1875); reg. 52 (1 – 31 July
1875); reg. 91 (1 – 31 January 1880); reg. 97 (1 – 31 July 1880); reg. 181 (2 – 24
January 1885); reg. 182 (24 – 31 January 1885); reg. 193 (1 – 10 July 1885); reg. 194
(1 – 10 July 1885); reg. 194 (11 – 18 July 1885); reg. 195 (19 – 31 July 1885); reg. 416
(18 – 31 January 1890).
7 This theme has been examined mainly in relation to community dynamics within
the neighbourhood: cf. Farge, A. (1986) La vie fragile. Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités a
Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris; Garrioch, D. (1986) Neighbourhood and Community in Paris
(1740 – 1790), Cambridge; Farr, J. R. (1987) ‘Crimine nel vicinato: ingiurie,
matrimonio e onore nella Digione del XVI e XVII secolo’, Quaderni storici, 3: 839 –

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54; Tebbutt, M. (1995) Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class

Neighbourhoods, 1880 – 1960, Aldershot, offers interesting observations on the
English working-class neighbourhood between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
8 In Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Roma degli anni 1870 – 71I, Rome, 1871, Seduta
straordinaria del Consiglio comunale – 27 giugno 1871 [Presentation of the Progetto di
regolamento di polizia urbana], pp. 492 – 529, p. 492.
9 Brief references to the relationship between private and public space in the lives of
the urban popular classes are made in Guerrand, R.-H. (1988) ‘Spazi privati’, in P.
Ariès and G. Duby (eds), La vita privata. L’Ottocento, Roma-Bari, pp. 258 – 325
(particularly in the chapters ‘Marcite urbane’ and ‘Le nuove abitazioni del popolo’);
cf. also M. Perrot (1988), ‘Modi di abitare’, in P. Ariès and G. Duby (eds), La vita
privata. L’Ottocento, Roma-Bari, pp. 243 – 57.
10 On the ‘Jacobin’ nature of the liberal project see Romanelli, R. (1988) Il comando
impossibile. Stato e società nell’Italia liberale, Bologna.
11 For example article 20 of the Regolamento prohibited the occupation of public
airspace ‘by underwear, clothes, drapes, sheets, etc, outside windows facing all
squares, streets, and alleys’, but this finds a loophole in article 223 which announced
that ‘exceptions, for the present, are the alleys of the Monti, Regola, Trastevere,
Ripa and Borgo precincts’ (all working class neighbourhoods).
12 Cited in De Rosa, G. (1895 – 1902) ‘Sicurezza pubblica’, Digesto Italiano, XXI:
360 – 83, see pp. 370 – 71 (my italics).
13 Ibid., p. 372.
14 Cf. the bibliography above.
15 Manfroni, C. (ed.) (1920) Sulla soglia del Vaticano (1870 – 1901). Dalle memorie di
Giuseppe Manfroni, Bologna, Vol. I, p. 17.
16 Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Roma degli anni 1870 – 71, Rome, 1871, pp. 492 – 529.
17 The guard was Roman, 30 years old, married, and lived in the same street as
Arcangelo, on the slopes of the Campidoglio.
18 ASR, Pr, b. 3.674, fasc. 19.322.
19 For example, of the Roman statutes of 1360, see ch. XL (De ponentibus manum ad
coltellum); for other manifestations of aggression, above all offensive to another’s
masculinity, chs XLIII (De facientibus aliquem cadere in terris) and LIII (De percutientibus
manu vacua) are interesting. The texts of the statutes were re-published at the end of
the nineteenth century: Re, C. (1880) Statuti della città di Roma per cura dell’Accademia
di conferenze storico-giuridiche, Rome. For an analysis of the Roman statutory norms,
see Pavan, P. (1996) ‘I fondamenti del potere: la legislazione statutaria del Comune
di Roma dal XV secolo alla Restaurazione’, Roma moderna e contemporanea, n. 2:
317 – 35.
20 On the culture of the knife, see Baronti, G. (1986) Coltelli d’Italia. Rituali di violenza
e tradizioni produttive nel mondo popolare, Padua.
21 ASR, PU, S, reg. 8, 2 January 1872.
22 ASR, Pr, b. 3.103, fasc. 6.932.
23 Under the papal regime in the nineteenth century, the number of agents in service
in Rome was considered by both the Direzione generale of the police and other
institutions of the city to be insufficient to cover the urban area. A rich source of
information on this point is the correspondence of the Direzione generale with the
Congregation of the Prefects, which periodically collected complaints from the
parishes. Cf. for example Archivio Storico del Vicariato di Roma, Segreteria del
Vicario, b. 118, fasc. b: Denuncie e segnalazioni di immoralità (1832 – 1862).
24 ASR, PU, S, reg. 2, 4 July 1871.
25 ASR, PU, S, reg. 46, 25 January 1875.
26 ASR, PU, S, reg. 52, 23 July 1975.

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27 ASR, PU, S, reg. 8, 27 February 1872.

28 The reference is from Goffman, E. (1988) Il rituale dell’interazione, Bologna, in
particular ch. 1.
29 ASR, PU, S, reg. 182, 27 January 1886.
30 On the multiplicity of meanings, symbolic and otherwise, held by city gates over the
longue durée, see De Seta, C. and Le Goff, J. (eds) (1989) La città e le mura, Rome-
Bari.
31 ASR, PU, S, reg. 52, 17 July 1875.
32 ASR, PU, S, reg. 193, 10 July 1885.
33 ASR, TP, S, v. 5.657, 10 December 1890.
34 ASR, PU, S, reg. 181, 21 January 1885.
35 ASR, PU, S, reg. 8, 9 January 1872.
36 ASR, PU, S, reg. 52, 17 July 1875 and, ibid., 12 July 1875.
37 ASR, PU, S, reg. 193, 10 July 1885.
38 ASR, PU, S, reg. 52, 19 July 1875.
39 ASR, S, b. 97, 1 October 1900.
40 ASR, Pr, b. 4.242, fasc. 32.032.

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