I arrive back in Rome only to find that the exasperated city authorities have introduced a range of rigid new rules designed to stamp out the boorish behavior, they say, of tourists.
From now on, there’s to be no frolicking in public fountains, an activity made famous by Anita Ekberg, who danced fetchingly in the city’s Baroque era Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini’s classic film “Dolce Vita.”
There’s to be no munching of fast food on the streets of the Eternal City. Men are not to wander around bare chested. Sweethearts can no longer attach so-called love locks to bridges, gates, or public monuments. Faux Roman centurions, who loiter around popular landmarks and demand cash when tourists pose for selfies with them, have also been targeted for disapproval and have been banned from haunting the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and other public attractions.
Those found breaching the new rules can be fined and exiled from the historic center for up to 48 hours. Rome’s first populist mayor, Virginia Raggi, says there’s to be “zero tolerance for those marring our city.”
She added, “We don’t want people to take a bath or ruin or dirty monuments anymore.”
Bravo. But I have my doubts that this stern regime will last longer than a few weeks. Ordinances have been issued repeatedly for years banning fake centurions from ancient monuments to little avail. The new rules aren’t, in fact, new at all — most were already on the books.
It is difficult not to conclude that Raggi, a member of the quirky anti-establishment Cinque Stella, or Five Star, Movement, is just indulging in political theater and a grand gesture, worried about her election prospects next spring.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the populist party known as Lega Nord, clearly has hopes of ousting her and has taken to trashing her management. That isn’t difficult to do; the city is in crisis. Mismanagement would be a more appropriate word for her handling of Rome. In recent months, the calls for her head have been mounting. Romans are exhausted by crippling problems, which Raggi has only compounded.
Trash collection is a disaster. The transportation system is failing. Recently, several major metro stations had to be abruptly shut down because they’d fallen into disrepair. Last October, the Repubblica metro was closed after the escalator inexplicably accelerated, injuring several people.
The mayor is also mired in widening corruption investigations that for some people seem to echo the infamous 2014 Mafia Capitale scandal involving city elders and organized crime under a previous municipal administration.
There’s also the issue of follow-through, not exactly a specialty of Italian administrators.
It is, of course, both a blessing and a disaster for Italy that rules get unevenly enforced.
The advantage is people can get around unworkable regulations, and that’s not a bad thing in a country where the red tape can tie everyone up in knots of Pirandello complexity. The downside is that necessary regulations get broken with a handshake, a wink, and an implied promise that the favor will be returned, and the consequences can be devastating: from highway bridges collapsing because of shoddy construction to villages suffering more damage than they should when tremors strike because of flouted building codes.
Favors don’t always work out. A friend of mine, an elderly Irish music professor and composer who spends part of the year in Italy with his wife, kept getting interrogated by the state police whenever he stayed at a hotel. Eventually, he and his wife talked with a local carabinieri capo in the town where they keep a house. Apparently, my friend shares his name with a suspected terrorist. The capo bewailed my friend’s plight and thought hard how to resolve it. Then he hit on the bright idea of asking his assistant to print from the database the official caution about my friend, and in a grand gesture, ripped up the page into little pieces, saying, “Professor, your problem is now over.”
Several weeks later, on a weekend trip, my friend was once again interrogated by the state police.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
