People in Motovun agree on very few things, but they do agree that the town enjoys a surfeit of nastiness. Enmities abound, and some are deeply entrenched. Not surprisingly, people here explain this phenomenon quite differently. I, a newcomer, like to think that it comes from the rapid decline of the community, in which favors are withheld because they are unlikely to be returned (“Surfeit of Nastiness,” August 30, 2006). Zoran Radojčić, who came here in the early 1990s, likes to talk about a radical shift in values due to the hasty transition from socialism to capitalism. Where people used to cooperate, they now compete. But Nives Valenta, who was born in Motovun in the early 1970s, looks at it from yet another angle. The people who came to the town soon after World War II, when it was depopulated, hailed from different parts of Croatia, and they were so different in terms of their habits that they never got along, not even when the community was rather stable in size, as well as long before the arrival of capitalism. These explanations do not exclude each other, of course, but Nives’ now strikes me as the most promising one.