Life on the Roman street mirrored the city’s physical condition. The Hobbesian state of all against all, characteristic of medieval Italy generally, reached its apotheosis in the gangsterism of medieval Rome. The city’s ruling class—the great aristocratic families like the Colonna and the Orsini—engaged in a perpetual war against one another, and beneath the violence of the highborn there was the violence of the gutter: of robbers and muggers and streetcorner toughs. In 1309, when the papacy, the last bastion of municipal authority, fled to the safety of Avignon, civic order collapsed
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